Structural, optical and electrical properties of a Schottky diode fabricated on Ce doped ZnO nanorods grown using a two step chemical bath deposition

Schottky diodes based on pure and Ce doped ZnO nanorods with Ce at% from 0.0 to 10.0 were fabricated using a chemical bath deposition technique. The effect of Ce doping on structural, optical and electrical properties was studied. X-ray diffraction spectroscopy and field emission scanning electron microscopy were used to study the crystalline structure and surface morphology, respectively. Raman spectroscopy at room temperature revealed that the dominant E2(high) peaks of Ce doped ZnO nanorods were red shifted compared to those in undoped ZnO. Room temperature photoluminescence spectroscopy of as-synthesized pure and Ce-doped ZnO nanorods showed that the UV emission was also red shifted with Ce doping enhancing the green-yellow emission compared to undoped ZnO nanorods. The optical band gap of pure and Ce doped ZnO nanorods were obtained from UV-vis results. Moreover, the I-V characteristics of a fabricated Schottky diodes revealed that the rectification behaviour of the diodes was improved by Ce doping. The maximum rectification was obtained at 10.0 at% Ce with ideality factor of 1.34 and barrier height of 0.856 eV.