Structural, Optical, Magnetic and Electrical Properties of Zinc Oxide Doped with Iron: A Review

Abstract

This study reviewed the structural, optical, magnetic and electrical properties of zinc oxide (ZnO) nano-particles doped with iron relative to zinc oxide. ZnO is an excellent nanomaterial in semiconductor industries because of its properties such as low cost, high stability and high absorbance. However, its application has been limited because of some undesirable characteristics. Hence, doping with iron has proven essential in overcoming these limitations. The X-ray diffraction studies show that the structure is hexagonal with wurtzite structure, ZnO films prefer to grow in the (002) direction. This is because each apex is parallel to the c-axis in the wurtzite structure. This review reported that optical band gap ZnO nano-particles doped with iron was found to be in the range to (3.26 - 3.35) eV. The electrical properties of these films indicated low resistivity and consequently high electrical conductivity at high dopant iron concentration. Consequently, higher electrical resistivity was observed with lower conductivity at lower iron dopant concentration. Higher iron-doped ZnO (x=0.10 and 0.20) samples exhibited obvious ferromagnetic behaviors suggesting that saturation magnetization of Zn1-xFexO nano-particles increases with the increasing of Fe doping concentration compared with pure ZnO. Hence the SEM of iron-doped zinc oxide nano-particles consists of ellipsoidal shape particles, which are well dispersed with smooth surface and uniform size.