The pronounced role of impurity phases in the optical properties of Mn catalyzed ZnS nanostructures

We report the effect of Mn self-doping in Mn catalyzed ZnS nanostructures grown via vapor liquid solid mechanism, which also resulted in the formation of additional impurity minority phases like ZnO and MnO2. The synthesized ZnS nanostructures were subsequently annealed in the range of 500 °C – 700 °C in an inert environment to remove impurity phases and enhance the incorporation of dopant. Room temperature photoluminescence showed strong defect assisted luminescence. It was observed that green emission due to intrinsic defects of ZnS nanostructures was reduced in magnitude and Mn related orange/red luminescence increased in magnitude in nanostructures annealed at high temperature. The presence of impurity phases led to the observation of surface optical and interface phonon modes as observed in the Raman spectroscopy. Dielectric continuum and phonon confinement models were employed to determine the correlation lengths of the optical phonon modes.