ZnO CO-DOPED WITH Ni AND Mg: PREPARATON BY COPRECIPITATION, CHARACTERISATION AND EFFECT OF AMOUNT OF THE CO-DOPANTS ON THE BANDWIDTH OF ZnO
K. Sreedhar, Sangeeth Sivan, Karthik Raja, Kirti Suresh, R. Sreelekshmi, A. Palat, K. Sreekanth
Abstract
Owing to the significance of semiconducting transition metal oxides, doped with transition metals, in the area of spintronics, we prepared zinc oxide co-doped with nickel and magnesium, following chemical co-precipitation strategy.Since our focus was also to look at the effect of the amount of the co-dopants on the bandwidth of zinc oxide, we prepared six different samples of zinc oxide co-doped with nickel and magnesium, varying the amount of the co-dopants.The prepared samples were characterized following Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis, powder Xray Diffraction Analysis and solid-state UV-visible spectral analysis.The Tau plots were utilized for the determination of the band width of all the prepared samples.The bandwidth of all the prepared samples thus obtained was compared with the bandwidth of pure undoped zinc oxide.For this, we also prepared pure undoped zinc oxide following a chemical precipitation strategy.It was observed that the bandwidth of all the prepared samples, zinc oxide co-doped with nickel and magnesium, is greater than that of the pure undoped zinc oxide that we prepared.Again, we observed that the bandwidth of pure zinc oxide increases as the amount of nickel and magnesium in the crystal lattice of zinc oxide increases.