Synthesis and investigation of structural and photoluminescence properties in zinc oxide doped aluminum quantum dots

In this research, zinc oxide doped aluminum nanoparticles (ZnO:Al) have been synthesized using a chemical co-precipitation method. The hexagonal structure of ZnO:Al has been confirmed by x-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. Photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL) has been employed to determine emission spectrum of nanoparticles, which showed three emission peaks at 395, 417 and 483 nm. The connection between Zn and O has been confirmed using the functional groups of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Furthermore, the results show that adding impurities to the quantum dots only changed the intensity peaks and there was no new functional group has been formed. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has been employed to determine crystallite size and microstructures ZnO:Al quantum dots, which were in agreement with the X-ray diffraction results.