In this work, aluminum (Al) doped ZnO nanorods (NRs) were prepared by hydrothermal method by doping Al with 1, 2 and 3 in weight percentage (wt. %) in addition to undoped ZnO NR. The influence of Al doping on the structural and optical properties of ZnO NRs were studied in this paper systematically. The surface morphology and optical properties of all the doped and undoped ZnO NRs samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), UV–vis spectroscopy and photoluminescence (PL) measurements. We found that the Al doping affected the structural and optical properties of the ZnO NRs, including their PL properties, absorption values and optical band gaps etc. It is observed from PL as well as UV-Vis spectroscopy that the bandgap value increases gradually with increase of the Al dopants concentration due to Burstein-Moss effect. The variation of bandgap according to Al dopants was extracted from PL also and compared with that of the UV-vis results.

Keywords: Zinc Oxide, Hydrothermal, SEM, PL, Al doped ZnO, UV-Vis.