Surface Plasmon Resonance In Zno Nanorod Arrays Caused By Gold Nanoparticles For Solar Cell Application

In this paper, we study the growth of gold nanoparticles (Au-NPs) onto ZnO nanorod arrays (ZnO-NRAs) and the surface plasmon resonance effect caused by them. ZnO-NRAs were deposited by the chemical spray pyrolysis method. Au-NPs were obtained by spin-coating of HAuCl4 in ethanol solution over the nanorod samples. According to XRD, the average size of Au-NPs on ZnO-NRAs increases from 27 nm to 72 nm by increasing the HAuCl4 concentration in solution from 0.01 to 0.1 mol/L. There are no visible changes in ZnO-NRAs morphology using the solutions with 0.0004-0.03 mol/L, partial dissolution of nanorods occurs when using HAuCl4 solution with the concentration of 0.05 mol/L or higher. ZnO-NRAs covered with Au-NPs show the red shift of the surface plasmon resonance band from 545 to 555 nm with increasing the HAuCl4 solution concentration from 0.002 to 0.05 mol/L. (C) 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim