The effect of Cu dopant on morphological, structural and optical properties of ZnO nanorods grown on indium tin oxide substrate

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Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a promising semiconductor due to its tunable optical properties. Among semiconductor nanostructures, one-dimensional structure such as ZnO nanorods becomes the main focus due to their wide potential application. Cu doped ZnO has attracted much attention recently because of its interesting properties, such as room temperature ferromagnetism, multiferroics properties and green emission. In this work, we deposited ZnO nanoseeds on indium tin oxide coated glass substrates and then ZnO nanorods were grown and doped with three different Cu concentrations (1, 4 and 7 at. %) by hydrothermal method. The scanning electron microscope showed that ZnO nanorod were grown with a hexagonal shape with diverse growth orientation. The X-ray diffraction analysis reveals that the addition of Cu doping tends to decrease the crystallite size and the lattice parameter. Generally, Cu doping reduces the absorbance at ultraviolet wavelength region except on the ZnO nanorods with 4% Cu. The addition of Cu also increases the bandgap energy and decreases the luminescence intensity in UV and visible regions, that is a sign that number of radiative transitions and the natural defects have been reduced.