Ultraviolet semiconductor lasers are widely used for applications in photonics, information storage, biology and medical therapeutics. Although the performance of gallium nitride ultraviolet lasers has improved significantly over the past decade, demand for lower costs, higher powers and shorter wavelengths has motivated interest in zinc oxide (ZnO), which has a wide direct bandgap and a large exciton binding energy. ZnO-based random lasing has been demonstrated with both optical and electrical pumping, but random lasers suffer from reduced output powers, unstable emission spectra and beam divergence. Here, we demonstrate electrically pumped Fabry-Perot type waveguide lasing from laser diodes that consist of Sb-doped p-type ZnO nanowires and n-type ZnO thin films. The diodes exhibit highly stable lasing at room temperature, and can be modelled with finite-difference time-domain methods.

Resistive memory is one of the most promising candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory technology due to its variety of advantages, such as simple structure and low-power consumption. Bipolar resistive switching behavior was observed in epitaxial ZnO nanoislands with base diameters and heights ranging around 30 and 40 nm, respectively. All four different states (initial, electroformed, ON, and OFF) of the nanoscale resistive memories were measured by conductive atomic force microscopy immediately after the voltage sweeping was performed. Auger electron spectroscopy and other experiments were also carried out to investigate the switching mechanism. The formation and rupture of conducting filaments induced by oxygen vacancy migration are responsible for the resistive switching behaviors of ZnO resistive memories at the nanoscale.