Investigations of optical, structural and antibacterial properties of Al-Cr dual-doped ZnO nanostructures

In this present work, we proposed dual doped transition metals (TMs) such as aluminum-chromium (Al-Cr) into ZnO nanostructures synthesized by the simple wet green chemical sol-gel method in lab scale using polyvinyl pyridine (PVP) as capping agent. The structure, optical characteristics and the antibacterial properties of the produced samples were studied. XRD results showed that undoped and dual-doped ZnO nanostructures have crystalline nature. The results of XRD and EDX revealed that the dopants Al and Cr were successfully doped into ZnO lattice. The morphology was found honey-comb like structure for dual-doping sample. TEM confirms the synthesized samples are in nano regime. Optical absorption measurements showed that when the dopants aluminium (Al) and chromium (Cr) were incorporated into ZnO there is a difference in the optical absorption towards the edge blue shifted 3.32-3.41 eV upon dual-doping. PL shows the green emission at 550 nm after dual doping which is attributed to the singly ionised oxygen vacancies. The well diffusion method was used for antibacterial activities of two bacteria Microccus luteus (M. luteus) and Vibrio cholera (V. cholera).