Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2011
Zinc oxide is a wide band gap material with excellent semiconducting, photonic and piezoelectric properties. In the past ten years zinc oxide nano-structures such as nanowires and nanorods have received great interest due to their unique dimensional and material properties in the area of photonics, electronics, mechanics, energy recovery, etc. In this paper we report the manufacturing process of a new shape, i.e. hollow hexagonal ZnO nano-cones. We grew them on different kinds of substrate using a low pressure, catalyst free, metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) process on a FirstNano EasyTube 3000™ MOCVD system. Nitrogen was used as carrier gas to bring the reactants, DEZ and H2O, to the substrate surface. At the right balance of process temperature and carrier/precursor gas flow rate the ZnO nano-structure transitioned into a hollow hexagonal cones growth mode. The both one and two dimensional aspects of these catalyst free hollow hexagonal ZnO nano-cones, which are novel to the best of our knowledge, could lead to new applications in photonics, near field probing, chemical sensors, quantum confinement, electronic, etc.