We investigated the effect of ZnO seed layer thickness on the density of ZnO nanorod arrays. ZnO has been deposited using two distinct processes consisting of the seed layer deposition using ALD and subsequent hydrothermal ZnO growth. Due to the coexistence of the growth and dissociation during ZnO hydrothermal growth process on the seed layer, the thickness of seed layer plays a critical role in determining the nanorod growth and morphology. The optimized thickness resulted in the regular ZnO nanorod growth. Moreover, the introduction of ALD to form the seed layer facilitates the growth of the nanorods on ultrathin seed layer and enables the densification of nanorods with a narrow change in the seed layer thickness. This study demonstrates that ALD technique can produce densely packed, virtually defect-free, and highly uniform seed layers and two distinctive processes may form ZnO as the final product via the initial nucleation step consisting of the reaction between Zn2+ ions from respective zinc precursors and OH− ions from H2O.

Keywords: ZnO, Nanorod, Seed layer, Atomic layer deposition, Hydrothermal growth.