Elsevier

Materials Letters

Volume 264, 1 April 2020, 127356
Materials Letters

Decoration of ZnO needles with nanoripples using gas cluster ion bombardment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2020.127356Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Surface nanoripples on ZnO needles are formed by gas cluster ion bombardment.

  • Nanoripples formed on a large surface of a needle resemble eolian sand ripples.

  • Nanoripples formed on the thin needles demonstrate well-ordered ribbed structure.

Abstract

Ar1000+ clusters accelerated by a voltage in the range of 10–15 kV were used to fabricate self-assembled nanoripples on the surface of ZnO needles. The influence of the cluster accelerating voltage and the lateral size of the needles on the ripple formation were studied. The nanoripples formed on a large surface of a needle resemble eolian sand ripples, whereas, those formed on the needle edges or thin needles demonstrate well-ordered ribbed structures.

Introduction

Self-assembled surface nanostructures formation has a great interest for bio-sensors, surface plasmon resonance, catalysis, field emission, gas sensing, and other applications where morphologically developed surface is necessary. For the first time formation of the self-assembled nanostructures (nanoripples) on the surface by off-normal monoatomic ion irradiation was studied by Navez et al. [1]. A theoretical background of the nanoripple formation was given by Bradley and Harper on the base of the Sigmund's sputtering theory [2]. However, not only monoatomic ion beam is capable of surface nanostructures formation. Recently it has been demonstrated that off-normal gas cluster ion irradiation also can produce nanostructures on the solid surface [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]. Due to a big size of the gas cluster (about 1000 atoms) the energy per atom is very low, which results in shallower penetration of the cluster atoms into the substrate (a few nm) and, as a consequence, in low damage of the surface layer as compared with the monoatomic beam [8]. All previous researches employing the gas cluster ion beam were devoted to formation of the nanostructures on the planar substrates. In this work we demonstrate fabrication of the nanostructures on the surface of ZnO needles. The results obtained in this study are of interest in applications of ZnO nanostructures for gas sensing, solar cells, field emitters, and so on, where developed surface morphology is required.

Section snippets

Experimental

To study the process of nanoripple formation on the nanostructured samples, ZnO needles were grown using the vapor phase deposition technique. An alumina boat with Zn granules (purity 99.9%) was placed into an alumina tube of a furnace. A 10 × 10 mm highly p-type doped Si 〈1 0 0〉 substrates (HF-Kejing Materials Technology Co., Ltd.) were mounted above the alumina boat. The tube was vacuumed by a mechanical pump to a pressure of 10 Pa. Then, an oxygen was introduced into the alumina tube at a

Results and discussion

In Fig. 2 (a) as-grown ZnO micro sized needles are shown. Fig. 2 (b,c) demonstrate effect of the Ar cluster bombardment on the needle surface. 10 and 15 kV bombardments result in formation of fine nanoripples with the wavelengths of 83 ± 15 and 93 ± 15 nm, respectively. A small increase of the ripple wavelength along with increasing accelerating voltage can be explained as follows. It is obvious that at higher cluster energy the sputtering yield of a target material and, consequently, amount of

Conclusions

The gas cluster bombardment has demonstrated capability of the nanoripple formation on the surface of the ZnO needles. Nanoripples with the wavelength of about 90 nm have been fabricated by the Ar1000+ cluster ions accelerated by a voltage of 10 and 15 kV and fluence of 3 × 1016 cluster/cm2. The influence of the accelerating voltage and the size of the irradiated area on the ripple formation have been studied. The ripples formed at higher accelerating voltage on the thinner needles demonstrate

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Vasiliy Pelenovich: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation. Xiaomei Zeng: Data curation, Writing - original draft. Rakhim Rakhimov: Validation, Resources. Wenbin Zuo: Writing - review & editing. Canxin Tian: Visualization, Funding acquisition. Dejun Fu: Funding acquisition. Bing Yang: Project administration.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11875210), the International Cooperation Program of Guangdong province science and technology plan project (2018A050506082), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under grant 2019M652687, and Talent project of Lingnan Normal University (ZL1931).

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