Sea-urchin-like ZnO nanostructures on Si by oxidation of Zn metal powders: Structural and optical properties

High-density sea-urchin-like ZnO nanostructures were grown on Si(100) substrates by the oxidation of metallic Zn powders at a low growth temperature without the use of any catalyst or additives. The morphological studies indicated that the grown structures are uniformly dispersed on the substrate and exhibited a sea-urchin-like shape consisting of several thousands of nanorods in one array, each ZnO nanorod of these structures having the diameter of 20–50 nm with the length of 2–4 μm. The high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and selected area electron diffraction patterns showed that the prepared sea-urchin-like ZnO nanostructures were single crystalline with wurtzite hexagonal structure and preferably grown along the [0001] direction. Room temperature Raman scattering and photoluminescence studies found that the as-grown nanostructures have good crystal quality with the hexagonal wurtzite phase.