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Zinc oxide: The versatile material with an assortment of physical properties
Date Issued
01-01-2014
Author(s)
Abstract
Zinc oxide has the potential to replace GaN as the next-generation white light emitting diode material. This wide bandgap semiconductor with an excitonic binding energy of ~60 meV has been researched extensively in the last decade due to its immense potentiality for blue/UV light emitting devices. ZnO lattice is amenable to doping with transition metal ions (TM) and 4f-elements. Such a doping activity in ZnO has been mainly aimed at the realization of n and p-type conductivity and room temperature diluted magnetic semiconducting behavior. Several doping studies have been attempted in order to get an insight into the changes in physical properties with the emphasis on fabricating of all ZnO p-n junctions for white light/UV emission. The challenge is to obtain highly stable p-ZnO with doping. Our group has been working on doping studies in ZnO. Ni doping shows a dramatic decrease in resistivity in polycrystalline ZnO. Stable and low resistive p-type conduction in ZnO was not possible with monovalent ion (Li, Ag etc.) doping. Recent work indicated the possibility of inducing shallow holes into ZnO lattice using co-doping route. We used Li and Ni co-doping to realize a low resistive, p-type and magnetic ZnO. Aligned 1-dimensional ZnO nanowires can also be obtained using PLD and other methods. Our research group at IIT Madras has been working closely with Kyushu University and other partner universities in Japan to make research in ZnO a worthwhile attempt aimed at device applications. We will present, in this chapter, overall physical properties of ZnO with our important results related to the doping aspects in ZnO. © Springer India 2014.
Volume
180