Synthesis of blue emitting ZnO nanorods exhibiting room temperature ferromagnetism

We report here a facile chemical method to prepare ZnO nanorods with micrometer length in large quantity at 80 °C. The as-prepared rods exhibited blue emission and room temperature ferromagnetism simultaneously. The PL of the as-prepared ZnO rods exhibited an overlapped broad emission in the 345–600 nm range. The as-prepared dried rods exhibited a saturation magnetization value of 59.14 × 10−3 emu g−1 at room temperature. On heating, though the material retains its morphology, the magnetization value decreased. Since we have observed a reduction in the intensity of the visible emission followed by a disappearance of the ferromagnetic ordering, we attributed the blue emission and the ferromagnetism to the presence of defects related to singly ionized oxygen vacancies and zinc vacancies.