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Published on: April 25, 2018
The impact of morphology upon the radiation hardness of ZnO layers
A Burlacu1, V V Ursaki, V A Skuratov
1Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Semiconductor Structures, Institute of Applied Physics, Academy of Sciences of Moldova, 5 Academy Street, 2028 Chisinau, Moldova. National Center for Materials Study and Testing, Technical University of Moldova, 168 Stefan cel Mare Avenue, 2004 Chisinau, Moldova.
Abstract:
It is shown that ZnO nanorods and nanodots grown by MOCVD exhibit enhanced radiation hardness against high energy heavy ion irradiation as compared to bulk layers. The decrease of the luminescence intensity induced by 130 MeV Xe(23+) irradiation at a dose of 1.5 × 10(14) cm(-2) in ZnO nanorods is nearly identical to that induced by a dose of 6 × 10(12) cm(-2) in bulk layers. The damage introduced by irradiation is shown to change the nature of electronic transitions responsible for luminescence. The change of excitonic luminescence to the luminescence related to the tailing of the density of states caused by potential fluctuations occurs at an irradiation dose around 1 × 10(14) cm(-2) and 5 × 10(12) cm(-2) in nanorods and bulk layers, respectively. More than one order of magnitude enhancement of radiation hardness of ZnO nanorods grown by MOCVD as compared to bulk layers is also confirmed by the analysis of the near-bandgap photoluminescence band broadening and the behavior of resonant Raman scattering lines. The resonant Raman scattering analysis demonstrates that ZnO nanostructures are more radiation-hard as compared to nanostructured GaN layers. High energy heavy ion irradiation followed by thermal annealing is shown to be a way for the improvement of the quality of ZnO nanorods grown by electrodeposition and chemical bath deposition.
