Influence of surface morphology on the optical property of vertically aligned ZnO nanorods

In this letter we have studied an influence of surface morphology on the optical property of vertically aligned ZnO nanorods. At low temperature the near band edge excitonic emission shows a strong dependence on surface morphology. A prominent and well resolved near band edge photoluminescence (PL) peak was obtained for nanowires with decreasing diameter and thus assigned due to the contributions to the optical properties of individual nanorods. Depending on surface morphology, the difference in low temperature PL property is attributed to the tailing of the density of states due to the potential fluctuations in randomly distributed intrinsic defects. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3231615]