Publication

Abstract : In the nanotechnology era, design and development of heterostructures are quiet often persuade exciting materials properties. These nanostructures have been investigated towards numerous applications including gas sensors over the years. In this background, we have solely investigated the charge transport properties, and role of photon interaction in the spray deposited ZnO/CdS heterostructure. Observed crystal structure of heterostructure revealed the formation of hexagonal wurtzite structure of ZnO and hexagonal phase of CdS respectively. Compositional analysis of deposited ZnO/CdS heterostructure showed the predominance of cadmium. Layered morphology of ZnO and CdS was observed with agglomerated nanograins on the surface. The exciton-phonon coupling strength of the heterostructure was found to be 0.2194. Heterostructure showed a fascinating figure of merits towards formaldehyde vapor at room temperature under photonic interaction. The lowest detection limit of formaldehyde was found to be 10 ppm. The response and recovery times for 10 ppm formaldehyde were 78  and 25 s respectively. Facile and low-cost heterostructure fabrication, high sensitive detection, long-term stability, faster response-recovery profile with better transient characteristics are the novel features of this work.