High optical quality long ultrafine ZnO nanowires by low-temperature oxidation of sputtered nanostructured Zn templates

In this study, we show that by applying appropriate deposition conditions, Zn nanostructured templates for the growth of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires can be fabricated, from which ultrafine high optical quality nanowires can be grown by means of post-deposition low-temperature oxidation. By identifying and optimizing the appropriate parameters, we successfully fabricated long ultrafine ZnO nanowires up to 30 microns in length and 50 nm in diameter. Our report contradicts the commonly held paradigm that sputter deposition can only be used to fabricate thin films with no significant nanostructure morphology and provides a low cost, high throughput method of fabricating different ZnO nanostructures. The studies of photoluminescence (PL) of the nanowires showed their high optical quality with band edge dominated emission with small defect-related input.