Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor with a high exciton binding energy, good piezoelectric response, and high optical transparency. As a thin film, it is commonly doped with Al and used as a transparent conducting oxide in solar cells, LEDs, and LCDs. However, unlike similar materials such as ITO and GaN, ZnO can be grown in an aqueous solution at mild temperatures. By using the advantages of bottom-up growth, we seek to avoid costly lithography steps for large area devices and the damage-inducing dry etch steps in devices where material quality is of utmost importance. My talk will focus on how we have exploited these bottom-up techniques to created new ZnO devices, which include nanostructured ZnO/Cu2O solar cells and ZnO optical resonators. Single crystalline ZnO optical resonators may also benefit from a selectively removable substrate such as gold. I will also present results on epitaxial deposition of ZnO on Au microplates, which can enable high quality structures requiring a metal/semiconductor interface.