The ability to achieve an understanding of the correlations between chemical synthesis, doping mechanism and properties of aluminium-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) nanocrystals is of great importance to evaluate the potential of ZnO:Al nanocrystals as optimal building blocks for solution deposited

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Due to a dominant one-dimensional growth rate, nanoparticles of zinc oxide often show a rodlike morphology. As a result, the synthesis of small spherical nanoparticles of undoped ZnO remains challenging. This paper presents two procedures that successfully produce a powder consisting of equiaxed zinc oxide nanoparticles: one using a polyethylene glycol- (PEG-) assisted solvothermal method and the other by calcination of zinc oxalate obtained from a microemulsion-mediated method. In the latter, zinc-substituted aerosol OT (AOT) is used as a surfactant. The samples are characterized by inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), photon correlation spectroscopy (PCS), and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. Both synthesis techniques produce nanoparticles with similar sizes in the range of 10 to 20 nm. Dense aggregates observed in the calcined powder are infrequent in the case of the solvothermal method.

Nanocrystalline ZnO:Al nanoparticles are suitable building blocks for transparent conductive layers. As the concentration of substitutional tetrahedral Al is an important factor for improving conductivity, here we aim to increase the fraction of substitutional Al. To this end, synthesis parameters of a solvothermal reaction yielding ZnO:Al nanorods were varied. A unique set of complementary techniques was combined to reveal the exact position of the aluminium ions in the ZnO lattice and demonstrated its importance in order to evaluate the potential of ZnO:Al nanocrystals as optimal building blocks for solution deposited transparent conductive oxide layers. Both an extension of the solvothermal reaction time and stirring during solvothermal treatment result in a higher total tetrahedral aluminium content in the ZnO lattice. However, only the longer solvothermal treatment effectively results in an increase of the substitutional positions aimed for.

Al-doped ZnO nanoparticles are synthesized by means of a heating up solution based thermal decomposition method. The synthesis involves a reaction of zinc acetylacetonate hydrate, aluminium acetylacetonate and 1,2-hexadecanediol in the presence of oleic acid and oleyl amine. A proposed reaction mechanism from reagents to monomers is corroborated by analysis of the evolving gases using headspace GC-MS analysis. The Al-doped ZnO nanoparticles synthesized are dynamically stabilized by adsorbed oleate ions, after deprotonation of oleic acid by oleyl amine, as was found by NOESY proton NMR and complementary FTIR spectroscopy. Precession electron diffraction shows a simultaneous increase in lattice parameters with Al concentration. This, together with HAADF-STEM and EDX maps, indicates the incorporation of Al into the ZnO nanoparticles. By the combination of complementary characterization methods during all stages of the synthesis, it is concluded that Al is incorporated into the ZnO wurtzite lattice as a dopant