from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Zinc oxide nanorods as a potential material for nanoscale devices are prepared by chemical bath deposition (CBD). The effect of the quality of the sol-gel deposited seed layer on the vertical alignment of the nanorods to a silicon substrate is discussed. Emphasis is put on the investigation of the impact of the heat treatment on the properties of the seed layer deposited by dip-coating. The sol-gel method is a multi-stage process consisting of three principal steps: (i) preparation of a solution with suitable precursors, (ii) deposition of the precursor solution, and (iii) the heat treatment. The preheating needs to be performed to thermally decompose the zinc acetate precursor into zinc oxide seeds. Three different temperatures of preheating are compared (300 °C, 350 °C, 400 °C) followed by annealing in argon at 800 °C and the influence on the quality of the seed layers and vertical alignment of nanorods are discussed. When the preheating temperature is higher than 350 °C, the seed layer comprises smaller and denser crystallites with a preferential orientation along the c-axis. CBD growth of ZnO nanorods on these seed layers results in their good vertical alignment.
Keywords: ZnO nanorods, sol-gel, seed layer, heat-treatment, chemical bath deposition© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.