The synthesis, characterization and device fabrication of ZnO, NiO and their composite nanostructures

Sammanfattning: Electronics industry has been revolutionized since last few decades because of the fabrication of electronic devices by using nanoscale based materials. But the more innovative feature in the electronic devices is the use of transparent materials, which makes the transparent electronic devices as one of the most interesting research field in nanoscience and nano-technology now a days. In order to have high performance electronic devices based on the wide band gap compound semiconductors, a selection of right transparent material is crucial step. Among all the transparent metal oxides, ZnO is one of the potential candidates due to the ease in the synthesis process, wide bandgap of 3.37 eV, a high exciton binding energy of 60 meV and diverse morphologies. Since p-type ZnO based nanodevices are still difficult to fabricate due to the instability and unreliability of p-type ZnO nanomaterial, therefore several p-type semiconductors are used for the development of p-n junctions. Among those NiO is suitable p-type compound semiconductor to make p-n junction with ZnO because of its wide band gap of 3.7 eV and environment friendly conditions for its synthesis. Keeping these attractive properties of n-type ZnO and p-type NiO, the synthesis of composite nanostructures of these two transparent oxides and fabrication of their electronic devices is presented in this dissertation work.I started my work with the synthesis of ZnO nanostructures focusing on the effect of different anions of zinc salts on the morphology and crystallinity of ZnO nanostructures. Then I grow honey-comb like NiO nanostructures on 3D nickel foam and used these nanostructures for the detection of Zinc ion. After that synthesized NiO and ZnO based composite nanostructures and characterized them, having main focus on the luminescence properties of ZnO when decorated with NiO nanostructures. The composite nanostructures of p-type NiO and n-type ZnO showed enhancement in the luminescence properties. Since pn junction is the back bone of electronic devices so working on the designing of band alignment along with the current transport properties of p-type NiO/n-type ZnO composite structures, an attempt was put forwarded to explain the phenomenon of these compound semiconducting materials. Different devices based on these two compound semiconducting materials are fabricated and designed in the present dissertation work, however still more work is required to improve the efficiency of devices like LEDs and UV detectors.