Development of a Seedless Floating Growth Process in Solution for Synthesis of Crystalline ZnO Micro/Nanowire Arrays on Graphene: Towards High‐Performance Nanohybrid Ultraviolet Photodetectors

Abstract

Abstract A seedless solution process is developed for controllable growth of crystalline ZnO micro/nanowire arrays directly on single‐layer graphene sheets made in chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In particular, the alignment of the ZnO micro/nanowires correlates well with the density of the wires, which is determined by both the sample configuration in solution and the graphene surface cleaning. With increasing wire density, the ZnO micro/nanowire array alignment may be varied from horizontal to vertical by increasing the physical confinement. Ultraviolet photodetectors based on the vertically aligned ZnO micro/nanowires on graphene show high responsivity of 1.62 A W −1 per volt, a 500% improvement over epitxial ZnO sensors, a 300% improvement over ZnO nanoparticle sensors, and a 40% improvement over the previous best results for nanowire/graphene hybrid sensors. This seedless, floating growth process could be scaled up for large scale growth of oriented ZnO micro/nanowires on graphene at low costs.