A general and facile one-pot protocol for the preparation of a broad range of alkyl and aryl isothiocyanates has been developed from their corresponding primary amines under aqueous conditions. This synthetic process involves an in situ generation of a dithiocarbamate salt from the amine substrate by reacting with CS(2) followed by elimination to form the isothiocyanate product with cyanuric ac...

1-D nanostructures, such as nanowires and nanotubes, have been extensively studied due to their potentials as building blocks for fabricating electronic, magnetic, electrooptic, and electrochemical nanodevices. Especially, wide-bandgap semiconductor nanowires and nanorods including ZnO and SnO2 were reported significantly. As for their synthetic routes, a carbothermal reduction process has been...

In ordinary polymer solar cells, the short exciton diffusion length causes increasing probability of electron–hole recombination as the active layer thickness exceeds the diffusion length. Hence, the diffusion sets a thickness limitation of the active layer. ZnO nanorods have been used to provide an advantage of electronic path, making it possible to increase the effective thickness of the acti...

For conventional dye or quantum dot sensitized solar cells, which are fabricated using mesoporous films, the inefficient electron transport due to defects such as grain boundaries and surface traps is a major drawback. To simultaneously increase the carrier transport efficiency as well as the surface area, optimal-assembling of hierarchical nanostructures is an attractive approach. Here, a thre...

Beside longitudinal growth along the length, we show that ZnO nanorods also exhibit transverse growth, which is responsible for the formation of interpenetrative nanorods. The longitudinal growth is lead by the catalytically active Zn-terminated (0001) surface, while the oxygen-terminated ð000 1Þ surface is catalytically inactive, resulting in the formation of ‘pencil’ or ‘bullet’ shaped nanost...

ZnO nanorods were synthesized using a low-cost sol-gel spin coating technique. The synthesized nanorods were consisted of hexagonal phase having c-axis orientation. SEM images reflected perpendicular ZnO nanorods forming bridging network in some areas. The impact of different hydrogen concentrations on the Pd-sensitized ZnO nanorods was investigated using an impedance spectroscopy (IS). The gra...

Zinc oxide (ZnO) with its deep level defect emission covering the whole visible spectrum holds promise for the development of intrinsic white lighting sources with no need of using phosphors for light conversion. ZnO nanorods grown on flexible plastic as substrate using a low temperature approach (down to 50 o C) were combined with different organic semiconductors to form hybrid junction. White...

A solution-grown subwavelength antireflection coating has been investigated for enhancing the photovoltaic efficiency of thin film solar cells. The 100-nm-height ZnO nanorods coating benefited the photocurrent of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells from 31.7 to 34.5 mA/cm2 via the decrease of surface light reflectance from 14.5% to 7.0%, contributed by the gradual refractive index profile between air and ...

Angle-dependent x-ray absorption near-edge structure ~XANES! and scanning photoelectron microscopy measurements were performed to differentiate local electronic structures at the tips and sidewalls of highly aligned ZnO nanorods. The overall intensity of the O K-edge XANES spectra is greatly enhanced for small photon incident angles. In contrast, the overall intensity of the Zn K-edge XANES is ...

One-dimensional zinc oxide nanorods array exhibit excellent electron mobility and thus hold great potential as photoanode for photoelelctrochemical water splitting. However, the poor absorption of visible light and the prominent surface recombination hider the performance improvement. In this work, Au nanoparticles and aluminium oxide were deposited onto the surface of ZnO nanorods to improve t...