Synthesis and characterizations of Zinc Oxide nanoparticles

Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles have shown great potentials because of their versatile and promising applications in different fields including solar cells. Various methods of synthesizing ZnO materials have been reported. In this work, controlled synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles were achieved via a simple, cost-effective, and a facile synthetic method. The synthetized ZnO nanoparticles were characterized by UV/Visual Spectrophotometer, X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopic (SEM) measurements. Using transmittance spectra and film thickness of ZnO, the optical band gap energies were calculated. For as-synthesized and annealed ZnO films, the band gap energies were found to be 3.26 eV and 3.40 eV respectively. Nature of the optical transition identifies that the material is direct band gap semiconductor. Similarly, XRD and SEM data reveal that the material is pure, and crystalline in nature.