Enhancing ethanol detection by heterostructural silver nanoparticles decorated polycrystalline zinc oxide nanosheets

Abstract Noble metals decorated two-dimensional nanostructures with a large surface-to-volume ratio raise substantial promise for many technological applications particularly for high-performance chemical sensing. Here, we design and synthesize a hierarchical heterojunction comprising ultrathin two-dimensional polycrystalline ZnO nanosheets on a large scale, which serve as reaction positions for reduced gases, and uniformly dispersed Ag nanoparticles to enhance reaction activity. We find that the Ag nanoparticles in the heterostructural system act as strong electron acceptors, inducing remarkable surface space charge layers. As a result, the heterostructural system shows significantly improved gas-sensing performance to ethanol as compared to pure ZnO. Such metal nanoparticles decorated two-dimensional polycrystalline ZnO nanosheets can be applied in not only as gas-sensing but also catalytic and photocatalytic fields.