Morphology and Growth Process of Bat-like ZnO Crystals by Thermal Evaporation

A novel bat-like ZnO nanostructure was synthesized on the silicon substrate by simple ther-mal evaporation of zinc powders without any catalyst. Each bat-like nanorod ("nanobat") is composed of a hexagonal head, a continuous neck and a thin handle. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy and selected area electron di raction results reveal the single-crystalline feature and the growing direction along 0001 of the nanobat. The vapor-solid mechanism was found suitable to explain the growth process of the nanobat and a schematic model was proposed in detail based on the experimental results.