UV Sensor Based on Single Metal Oxide Nanowire

Nanostructures with high surface-to-volume ratios are great candidates for the next generation of high performance electronic devices. Low temperature hydrothermal synthesis techniques to produce such nanostructures at low cost and large scale are very desirable. In this work, the fabrication of a low-cost metal?semiconductor?metal UV sensor based on single ZnO nanowire as the active material is presented. The single nanowire UV sensor demonstrates a 272% enhancement in sensitivity and 21 times faster in response compared with a thin film detector. The improvement in the device performance is attributed to the high quality of the grown nanowires as well as their high aspect ratio and reduced dimensionality. This work represents a low cost method to produce efficient ZnO UV sensors at large scale and low cost.