Effect of annealing on UV‐visible absorption and photoluminescence behavior of liquid phase deposited TiO ₂ nanorods

Abstract In this work, anatase and rutile TiO ₂ nanorods were fabricated using one‐step liquid phase deposition process, followed by heat treatment in the range 300‐800°C. The direct and indirect band gap of the TiO ₂ nanorods was estimated form optical absorption data which illustrated a red shift at higher temperatures owing to the different nature of excitons in anatase and rutile phases. The photoluminescence (PL) spectra revealed the presence of two main emission bands consisting of four peaks. It was found that two high‐energy peaks located at 2.95‐3.30 eV could be generated from exciton transitions from the conduction band to the valence band of TiO ₂ nanorods, while two low‐energy peaks located at 2.43‐2.64 eV may arise from surface state transitions. The PL intensity firstly increased with temperature and at 500°C reached a maximum value, then decreased through increasing temperature up to 800°C. These variations in the intensity of PL emission could be explained in terms of changes in phase structure, crystallinity, and amount of the oxygen vacancies, which are all dependent to the annealing temperature based on X‐ray diffractometer and X‐ray photoelectron spectrometer studies. These results indicated that annealing temperature allows to manipulate the properties of TiO ₂ nanorods for opto‐electronic applications.