Preparation of NiO/Si and ZnO/Si photo-detectors by laser ablation in water

When it comes to preparation two materials by (ZnO and NiO) laser ablation method in the same conditions, the question research could be investigated the effect of the different materials (ZnO and NiO) on the Si substrate that used as a photo-detector. The laser ablation process was used to create nickel oxide and zinc oxide (NiO and ZnO), which were then drop-cast onto silicon and glass substrates. The result of XRD indicates that the films that were deposited are poly-crystalline in nature, with crystalline sizes between 70 and 83 nm. Studies using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) show that the film is made up of uniformly sized nanoparticles, each having a size of less than 100 nm. The band gap of nickel oxide was found to be approximately 4.8 eV and 3.8 eV, respectively, according to UV–Vis spectroscopy. According to FT-IR analysis, the peak at 663 cm⁻¹ is due to nickel–oxygen vibration, while the peak at 608.6 cm⁻¹ denotes ZnO nanoparticle stretching vibrations, which confirms the formation of nanoparticles in solution. We looked at the optoelectronic characteristics of ZnO/Si and NiO/Si photo-detectors. The detectivity of the NiO/Si photo-detector was 1.2 × 10¹¹ at 450 nm, while that of ZnO/Si was 1.9 × 10¹¹ at 400 nm. This indicates that the ZnO material is better than NiO as a detector.