A low-cost sol–gel spin-coating technique is used in this study for the simple synthesis of eco-friendly ZnO multilayer films deposited on (100)-oriented silicon substrates ranging from 150 to 600 nm by adjusting the spin coating rate.
Transition-metal
oxides such as cupric and cuprous oxides are strongly
correlated materials made of earth-abundant chemical elements displaying
energy band gaps of around 1.2 and 2.1 eV. The ability to design nanostructures
of cupric and cuprous oxide semiconductors with in situ phase change
and morphological transition will benefit several applications including
photovoltaic energy conversion and photoelectrochemical water splitting.
Here, we have developed a physicochemical route to synthesize copper
oxide nanostructures, enabling the phase change of cupric oxide into
cuprous oxide using an electric field of 105 V/m in deionized
water via a new synthetic design protocol called electric-field-assisted
pulsed laser ablation in liquids (EFA-PLAL). The morphology of the
nanostructures can also be tuned from a sphere of ∼20 nm to
an elongated leaf of ∼3 μm by controlling the intensity
of the applied electric field. Futuristically, the materials chemistry
occurring during the EFA-PLAL synthesis protocol developed here can
be leveraged to design various strongly correlated nanomaterials and
heterostructures of other 3d transition-metal oxides.
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