Tailoring the optical performance of sprayed NiO nanostructured films through cobalt doping for optoelectronic device applications

Abstract

The current study aims to tailor the structural and nonlinear/linear optical characteristics of NiO nanostructures for optoelectronic applications. The spray pyrolysis procedure was applied to synthesize Ni1-xCoxO nanostructured films (x; 0, 0.04, 0.08, 0.12, 0.16 and 0.20). The functional groups and morphological investigation were performed by the FT-IR and SEM techniques. The structural and optical properties were investigated based on XRD and UV–vis measurements. The XRD investigations reveal that all samples have a cubic crystalline structure. The UV–vis analysis shows that the optical absorption of NiO nanostructures increased, and the energy bandgap decreased from 3.85 eV to 3.40 eV through cobalt doping. The Herve-Vandamme model was applied to investigate the linear refractive index for all samples. The nonlinear optical (NLO) behavior of all samples has been investigated. A significant improvement was accomplished through cobalt doping in the linear refractive index, optical conductivity, dielectric constants, NLO susceptibility and NLO refractive index of NiO. The achieved results suggest that cobalt-doped NiO nanostructured films have potential applications in linear/nonlinear optical devices and data storage.