The Fabrication And Properties Of Optoelectronic Devices Based On One Dimensional CuO Nanowires

Copper oxide (CuO), as one of the most important metal oxide semiconductors, has been widely used because of its abundance in resources and low cost in synthesis. Low dimensional CuO nanostructures (zero dimensional and one dimensional nanostructures) are used, in particular via simple thermal evaporation method, wet chemical method, and metal-assisted growth method. It has been found that the CuO NWs obtained from the above methods normally have good crystallinity and high aspect ratio, which renders them attractive and promising building blocks for fabricating high performance electronic devices systems, such as photodetector, gas sensor, field emission, catalyst and so on.Despite of the above research progresses, there is a sparsity of research activity dealing with the transport and optoelectronic property of individual CuO nanostructures, which constitutes the basic building blocks of various optoelectronic and electronic devices. Herein, we report the synthesis of CuO NWs by heating surface mechanical attrition treatment (SMAT) processed copper foil in tube furnace. The CuO NW is of single crystal with a growth direction of [110]. Individual CuO NW based field-effect transistor display weak p-type electrical conduction behavior. According to the theoretical simulation based on first-principle calculation, we found that neither CuO with a Cu vacancy nor a O vacancy can lead to the observed p-type conduction behavior. Further optoelectronic characterization shows that the CuO NW is sensitive to incident light of 600 nm, with high producibility and stability. It is also observed that the photodetector fabricated on flexible PET substrate showed good reproducibility under different bending conditions. The above result suggests that our CuO NWs will have promising potential in future devices applications.