Effect of air-annealing on the morphological, microstructural and optical properties of CdSe NCs grown into porous anodic alumina template

In this work, cadmium selenide nanocrystals (CdSe NCs) were embedded into porous anodic alumina (PAA) template by simple immersion in aqueous solution containing L-cysteine (Cys) functionalized CdSe NCs and water. The prepared samples were heat treated at different temperatures between 150 and 300 degrees C during 30 min under air. The effect of thermal treatment under air on the CdSe NCs/PAA has been shown from morphological, microstructural and optical studies. Several characterization techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectroscopy were used to investigate the surface morphology and microstructural properties of CdSe nanoparticles on the PAA template as function of air-annealing temperature. XRD study shows the transformation phase of deposited CdSe nanoparticles on the PAA template from cubic structure to hexagonal structure at 300 degrees C. The morphology of CdSe nanorods array which are into the PAA surface were exhibited by AFM scan. Optical properties of CdSe NCs into PAA have been studied at different air-annealing temperatures using optical absorption and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The results showed that the crystal quality was significantly improved with the annealing temperature increase, bringing about an enhancement in PL and a decrease in optical band gap from 2.44 to 2.2 eV exhibiting a red shift. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.