Synthesis of Fe-Doped ZnO Nanorods by Rapid Mixing Hydrothermal Method and Its Application for High Performance UV Photodetector

We have successfully synthesized Fe-doped ZnO nanorods by a new and simple method in which the adopted approach is by using ammonia as a continuous source of OH- for hydrolysis instead of hexamethylenetetramine (HMT). The energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectra revealed that the Fe peaks were presented in the grown Fe-doped ZnO nanorods samples and the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) results suggested that Fe3+ is incorporated into the ZnO lattice. Structural characterization indicated that the Fe-doped ZnO nanorods grow along the c-axis with a hexagonal wurtzite structure and have single crystalline nature without any secondary phases or clusters of FeO or Fe3O4 observed in the samples. The Fe-doped ZnO nanorods showed room temperature (300 K) ferromagnetic magnetization versus field (M-H) hysteresis and the magnetization increases from 2.5 mu emu to 9.1 mu emu for Zn0.99Fe0.01O and Zn0.95Fe0.05O, respectively. Moreover, the fabricated Au/Fe-doped ZnO Schottky diode based UV photodetector achieved 2.33 A/W of responsivity and 5 s of time response. Compared to other Au/ZnO nanorods Schottky devices, the presented responsivity is an improvement by a factor of 3.9.