Sequential Growth of Zinc Oxide Nanorod Arrays at Room Temperature via a Corrosion Process: Application in Visible Light Photocatalysis

Many photocatalyst systems catalyze chemical reactions under ultraviolet (UV) illumination, because of its high photon energies. Activating inexpensive, widely available materials as photocatalyst using the intense visible part of the solar spectrum is more challenging. Here, nanorod arrays of the wide-band-gap semiconductor zinc oxide have been shown to act as photocatalysts for the aerobic photo-oxidation of organic dye Methyl Orange under illumination with red light, which is normally accessible only to narrow-band semiconductors. The homogeneous, 800-1000-nm-thick ZnO nanorod arrays show substantial light absorption (absorbances >1) throughout the visible spectral range. This absorption is caused by defect levels inside the band gap. Multiple scattering processes by the rods make the nanorods appear black. The dominantly crystalline ZnO nanorod structures grow in the (0001) direction, i.e., with the c-axis perpendicular to the surface of polycrystalline zinc. The room-temperature preparation route relies on controlled cathodic delamination of a weakly bound polymer coating from metallic zinc, an industrially produced and cheaply available substrate. Cathodic delamination is a sequential synthesis process, because it involves the propagation of a delamination front over the base material. Consequently, arbitrarily large sample surfaces can be nanostructured using this approach.