Controlled growth of novel doorframe-like ITO nanostructures and their photoluminescence properties

This paper describes a thermal evaporation method that generated large-scale novel doorframe-like ITO nanostructures by regularly switching flow rate of the carried gas. Their morphology and microstructures were determined by scanning electron microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The as-synthesized doorframe-like nanostructures are single crystal with diameters ranging from hundreds of nm to about 1 μm. The growth direction of the doorframe-like nanostructures are < 100> and < 011> and the growth process follows a self-catalytic vapor–liquid–solid mechanism. The PL spectrum of the doorframe-like nanostructures shows two emission bands around 418 and 505 nm, which is probably resulted from oxygen vacancies, oxygen–indium vacancy pairs and impurity level, respectively.