Effect of manganese doping on the photoluminescence characteristics of chemically synthesized zinc sulfide nanoparticles

The studies on luminescent II-VI semiconducting nanomaterials have attracted widespread attention recently, due to their potential applications in optoelectronic and biophotonic devices. Amongst other II-VI semiconductor nanoparticles (NPs), Mn2+-doped ZnS NPs having large exciton binding energy and wide direct band gap at room temperature have drawn considerable attention for exploring its interesting optical properties. However, in this report, water-soluble Mn2+-doped ZnS (ZnS: Mn) NPs with Mn2+ concentration varying between 1.5 and 5% (wt%) have been synthesized by chemical co-precipitation method at room temperature. X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies and the analysis of the selected area electron diffraction (SAED) pattern, obtained from transmission electron microscopy (TEM), confirmed the formation of zinc blende structure in all the synthesized samples. The particle sizes of the samples, as obtained from the optical absorption studies, varies between 2.2 and 2.7 nm with the increase of Mn2+ concentration between 1.5 and 5%. The room temperature photoluminescence (PL) emission measurements revealed the presence of yellow-orange emission band in all the Mn2+-doped samples which is attributed to Mn incorporation in ZnS. The Gaussian fittings of the measured PL spectra of all the samples show the presence of four PL peaks. Amongst the four PL peaks three peaks appeared at 445, 476, and 520 nm in all the samples but the fourth yellow-orange emission peak suffered a red shift from 593 to 600 nm with increasing Mn2+ concentration from 1.5 to 5%. In this report no quenching of yellow-orange emission peak is observed up to 5% Mn2+-doping concentration in ZnS. The synthesized water-soluble ZnS: Mn NPs can be further functionalized for using them as biolabels.