Nanowire Array Based UV Detectors

Mohammad R. Alenezi, Talal H. Alzanki, Abdullah M. Almeshal

Abstract: Low temperature hydrothermal fabrication of high performance nanostructured detectors possesses a great potential for the next generation of smart low cost electronic devices. In this work, the fabrication of a low-cost metalsemiconductormetal photodetectors based on ZnO nanowire array as the active layer is presented. The nanowire array UV detector demonstrates a 272 % enhancement in sensitivity and 21 times faster in response compared with a thin film detector. The improvement in the device performance is attributed to the high quality of the grown nanowires as well as their high aspect ratio and reduced dimensionality. This work represents a low cost method to produce efficient ZnO UV detectors at large scale and low cost.

Keywords: Nanowires, ZnO, sensors, photodetector, array