Electrical and optical behavior of ZnO nanowires irradiated by ion beam

Zinc oxide nanowires have been attracting much interest due to their potential use in electronics and optoelectonics devices. In this work, we report on the photoluminescence and electrical behavior of ZnO nanowires grown by vapor-liquid-solid method and irradiated with 1.2 MeV He⁺ ions at several doses. The results strongly indicates the existence of an enhanced dynamic annealing effect during the low fluence irradiations allowing it to heal low migration barrier point-defects such as oxygen interstitials (O_I), zinc interstitials (Zn_I), zinc antisites (Zn_O) and oxygen antisites (O_Zn). On the other hand, highly stable defects such as oxygen vacancies (V_O), which present higher migration barrier energy, seems to be more pronounced giving rise to short-infrared emission at 1.7 eV.