Synthesis of ZnO nanostructures by spontaneous oxidation of Zn films on p-type silicon substrates

ZnO nanostructures have been synthesized on p-type silicon substrates using a two-step, spontaneous oxidation of Zn films method at room temperature. The samples both with and without a thin layer of gold in different positions have been spontaneously oxidized in a humid atmosphere for seven days to form nanosheets and ball-cactus like nanostructures. Diverse morphologies of hierarchical ZnO nanostructures have been obtained by annealing the samples at 700 degrees C in a nitrogen atmosphere for 1 h. A growth mechanism has been proposed for the formation of different ZnO nanostructures. It was found that the band-gap emission can be greatly improved and that the defect emission is suppressed to a noise level when a thin layer of Au was deposited between the Zn and the Si substrate. Moreover, our results show that the ZnO/p-Si heterojunction exhibits good performance for visible spectrum detection. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.