Effect of Mn Dopant on Lattice Parameters and Band Gap Energy of Semiconductor ZnO Nanoparticles

Abstract

ZnO belongs to the II-VI semiconductor group with a direct band-gap of 3.2-3.37 eV in 300K and a high exciton binding energy of 60 meV. It has good transparency, high electron mobility, wide, and strong room-temperature luminescence. These properties have many applications in a wide area of emerging applications. Doping ZnO with the transition metals gives it magnetic property at room temperature hence making it multifunctional material, i.e. coexistence of magnetic, semiconducting and optical properties. The samples can be synthesized in the bulk, thin film, and nanoforms which show a wide range of ferromagnetism properties. Ferromagnetic semiconductors are important materials for spintronic and nonvolatile memory storage applications. Doping of transition metal elements into ZnO offers a feasible means of tailoring the band gap to use it as light emitters and UV detector. As there are controversial on the energy gap value due to change of lattice parameters we have synthesized Mn-doped ZnO nanoparticles by co-precipitation method with different concentrations to study the effect of lattice parameters changes on gap energy. The doped samples were studied by XRD, SEM, FT-IR., and UV-Vis. The XRD patterns confirm doping of Mn into ZnO structure. As Mn concentrations increases the peak due to of Mn impurity in FT-IR spectra becomes more pronounces hence confirming concentrations variation. We find from UV-Vis spectra that the gap energy due to doping concentration increases due to the Goldschmidt-Pauling rule this increase depends on dopant concentrations and increases as impurity amount increases.