Properties of Zinc Oxide Nanowires on Zinc Oxide Thin Film Coated Amorphous Glass Substrates

Nowadays, fabrication of electronic devices using nanostructured materials has been important since it does provide a way of improving devices efficiency. Nanostructured materials have been known to have high surface area per volume and also exhibit unique properties such as visible light transparency and quantum confinement effect. Such characteristics produce excellent reaction area in the devices and improve electron transport mechanism as well. Therefore, the preparation of nanostructured materials with considerable cost and high quality is important as a first step towards realization of nanostructured material based electronic devices. There are a lot of materials which have been studied for electronic devices fabrication such as tin dioxide (SnO2), titanium dioxide (TiO2) and zinc oxide (ZnO). ZnO material has been identified as one of a promising material in electronic device fabrication due to its properties such as wide band gap, thermal stability, transparency and non-toxicity. It also has various kinds of nanostructure such as nanowires, nanotubes, nanorods, nanocombs and nanoflowers. So far, ZnO materials have been used and studied in dye-sensitized solar cell, sensor and light emitting diode applications. However, further study need to be conducted continuously since there are still a lot of technologically unsolved problem. In this paper, we reported the properties of ZnO nanowires grown on ZnO thin films coated amorphous glass substrates by aqueous chemical growth (ACG) method. The use of glass substrate and ACG method in this research is cost effective thus open a door for low cost electronic devices fabrication. The ZnO thin films were prepared using different precursor`s molar concentrations on glass substrates by sol-gel spincoating method. The properties of ZnO nanowires grown on different thin films were studied. The samples were characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), and photoluminescence (PL) measurement for surface morphology, structural and optical properties, respectively. SEM images confirm the growth of ZnO nanowires on all substrates. XRD pattern indicates the wurtzite structure of ZnO nanostructures for all prepared samples. PL spectra reveal the dependency of ultraviolet (UV) and visible emission properties of nanostructured ZnO on different thin films.