Abstract
ZnO nano/microstructures have been formed by thermal evaporation method using ZnO powders mixed with carbon group elements (C, Si, Ge, Sn, or Pb) as the reducing agent. For cases of mixed precursors of ZnO/C, ZnO/Si, and ZnO/Ge, the pure ZnO nano/microstructures are realized, while for ZnO/Sn (ZnO/Pb) systems, the phase of Pb2O3(Zn2SnO4) generally are represented in the ZnO products. The appearance of Pb2O3(Zn2SnO4) is attributed to the lower melting point and higher vapor pressure of Sn (Pb) in the heating and evaporation processes. The morphologies and sizes of the products are controlled by adjusting the growth regions and/or introducing gaseous argon. Room temperature (RT) photoluminescence spectra indicate that the intensity (peak position) of the ultraviolet emission is increased (redshift) due to the existence of Zn2SnO4 phase in the ZnO products. The Pb2O3(Zn2SnO4) phase in ZnO nano/microstructures plays a important role in enhancing the saturation magnetizations of RT ferromagnetism with respect to the case of pure ZnO products fabricated by the precursor of mixed ZnO and graphite.
Highlights
In recent decades, great interests have been focused on zinc oxide (ZnO) since it has a wide band gap and large exciton binding energy
We systemically study the synthesizing ZnO nano/microstructures using carbon group elements, i.e., graphite-C, silicon-Si, germanium-Ge, tin-Sn, and plumbum-Pb as the reducing agent
The morphologies and compositions of the products synthesized by ZnO–Sn (Fig. 1a–c) and ZnO–Pb (Fig. 1d–f) are studied in detail by SEM (EDX, the inset of Fig. 1) in this letter
Summary
Great interests have been focused on zinc oxide (ZnO) since it has a wide band gap and large exciton binding energy. For the synthesis of ZnO nanostructures, thermal evaporation method has been widely used. The reducing agent of graphite was generally mixed with ZnO powder to fabricate pure nanostructural ZnO at a temperature of 1,000–1,100 °C [9, 10]. Our group [11] reported that besides the conventional graphite, a variety of metallic elements can be used as the effective reducing agent to achieve pure ZnO nano/microstructures by the thermal evaporation method. It speculates that the elements in the periodic table that have relatively small ionization energy can be used as new reducing agents.
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