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Sonochemical approach for rapid growth of zinc oxide nanowalls

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Abstract

The sonochemical process drives chemical reactions with sound fields by creating extraordinarily high density of energy, pressure and temperatures. The process resulted in a number of unexpected chemical species and thought-provoking results in the recent past. In this paper, we present a new sonochemical approach to synthesize ZnO (zinc oxide) nanowalls (NWalls) on aluminum and alumina coated substrates at room ambient conditions. We achieved highly dense and uniform ZnO NWalls in areas that are coated with Al or Al2O3 (alumina). The synthesis process was shown not to occur on Si, SiO2, Cr, or Ag surfaces. A series of experiments on understanding the growth kinetics offers detailed insight into the growth dynamics over time. Photoluminescence (PL) measurements, UV Vis spectroscopy, and SEM-EDS results confirm NWalls composed of crystalline ZnO that are formed via Al assisted growth induced by phase transformations under extraordinary pressure, temperature, and chemical growth kinetics. The chemical growth method as reported here, is applicable to arbitrary substrates coated with an Al thin film. We demonstrate the applications of the as-formed NWalls in UV photoconductors and gas sensors.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Matthew Ombaba, Prof. Savas Kaya, Prof. Neizh Pala, Prof. Aykutlu Dana and Ta-Chun Lin for their helpful suggestions and training on specific tools.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Davis, Davis, 95616, USA

    Avinash P. Nayak, Aaron M. Katzenmeyer & M. Saif Islam

  2. Yamatake Corporation and BSAC Berkley, Kanagawa, Japan

    Yasuhiro Gosho

  3. Department of Physics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 06531, Turkey

    Bayram Tekin

Authors
  1. Avinash P. Nayak
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  2. Aaron M. Katzenmeyer
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  3. Yasuhiro Gosho
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  5. M. Saif Islam
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Correspondence to M. Saif Islam.

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Nayak, A.P., Katzenmeyer, A.M., Gosho, Y. et al. Sonochemical approach for rapid growth of zinc oxide nanowalls. Appl. Phys. A 107, 661–667 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-012-6823-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-012-6823-8

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