Synthesis of Fe‐Doped ZnO Nanorods by Rapid Mixing Hydrothermal Method and Its Application for High Performance UV Photodetector

Abstract

We have successfully synthesized Fe‐doped ZnO nanorods by a new and simple method in which the adopted approach is by using ammonia as a continuous source of OH − for hydrolysis instead of hexamethylenetetramine (HMT). The energy dispersive X‐ray (EDX) spectra revealed that the Fe peaks were presented in the grown Fe‐doped ZnO nanorods samples and the X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) results suggested that Fe 3+ is incorporated into the ZnO lattice. Structural characterization indicated that the Fe‐doped ZnO nanorods grow along the c ‐axis with a hexagonal wurtzite structure and have single crystalline nature without any secondary phases or clusters of FeO or Fe 3 O 4 observed in the samples. The Fe‐doped ZnO nanorods showed room temperature (300 K) ferromagnetic magnetization versus field (M‐H) hysteresis and the magnetization increases from 2.5 μ emu to 9.1 μ emu for Zn 0.99 Fe 0.01 O and Zn 0.95 Fe 0.05 O, respectively. Moreover, the fabricated Au/Fe‐doped ZnO Schottky diode based UV photodetector achieved 2.33 A/W of responsivity and 5 s of time response. Compared to other Au/ZnO nanorods Schottky devices, the presented responsivity is an improvement by a factor of 3.9.