Synthesis of Fluorine Doped Zinc Oxide Particles by Hydrothermal Method

Abstract

Zinc oxide with a wide band gap energy (3.37 eV) and a hexagonal wurtzite crystal structure has attracted a great deal of attention for its potential application including piezoelectric devices, transistors, photodiodes, photo catalysis, biomedicine, etc. 1-4. Various synthesis methods such as wet-chemical route 5 , chemical vapour deposition (CVD) 6 , vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) 7 , chemical solution methods 8 and hydrothermal method 9 have been used to grow doped ZnO micro/nano-crystals. Among these methods, the hydrothermal method is promising for fabricating ideal material with special morphology because of the simple, fast, less expensive, low growth temperature, high yield and scalable process. In recent years, introducing cationic impurities in ZnO structure offers an effective approach to adjust structural, optical and electrical properties 10-14. An alternative way to adjust the physical properties of the ZnO particles is the replacement of oxygen ions (O 2-) in the ZnO lattice by anionic impurities, such as fluorine (F-) 15. Most of the previous research works have focused on fluorine-doped ZnO thin films. There are less studies with fluorine doped ZnO particles. In addition, in many studies ZnO particles were synthesized by using zinc acetate or zinc nitrate precursor, but using zinc chloride as a precursor material is very seldom reported. In this paper, we have studied the fluorine doped ZnO particles (ZnO:F) prepared by hydrothermal technique using zinc chloride precursor and we have also investigated