A New Approach Formation of Porous Structures in ZnO

Nowadays, fabrication of porous materials with a controllable size and shape has been of great scientific and technological interest since porous materials posses unique properties which can find potential applications in catalysis, photonics, microelectronics, electro-optics, adsorbent, insulators, life science, biomaterials engineering, bio interface, sensors, coatings and nano lithographic template for etching. In this paper, formation of porous structures onto the electrochemically grown ZnO thin films has been reported via dodecanethiol (C12SH-SAMs). Characterizations of electrochemically grown ZnO thin films have been shown that the films posses highly (002) c-axis orientation, high nucleation, high intensity, relatively low FWHM of UV emission at the band edge region and sharp UV absorption edge. SEM measurements showed that diameters of porous structures vary between 90 nm to 750 nm. After porous formation onto the ZnO surface, XRD, absorption and photoluminescence measurements have revealed that the porous structures does not show significant change in structural and optical characteristics