There have been intensive studies in the field of nanosized materials in order to improve the performance of electronic devices. ZnO seems to be the ideal candidate for possible applications in micro-, opto- and magnetoelectronics. It is not only a wide band gap (3.37 eV) semiconductor with a large exciton binding energy of 60 meV, it furthermore has the property of self-organised growth resulting for instance in well aligned nanorods building regular block-structures.

Most of the research on ZnO nanostructures was focused on the deposition techniques using processes like metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), vapor phase transport (VPT), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD) or aqueous chemical growth (ACG). However, there have been only few reports on the electrical characteristics of single ZnO nanostructures.

Here we report on our findings concerning the electrical property measurements of ZnO nanorods synthesized by VPT. The rods are single-crystalline and of high quality as TEM pictures reveal. They grow in vertically aligned pillar arrays and reach widths of 70 nm to 1 µm and up to 15 µm in length. Current-voltage characteristics were measured for single as well as for bundles of nanorods. E-beam lithography has been used to make electrical contact to single nanorods in various geometries. The specific resistance of a nanorod was determined to be about 8×10^-2 Ωcm. Assuming an electron mobility of 100 cm²V^-1s^-1 this leads to a carrier concentration of 7.8×10¹⁷ cm^-3. Additionally, we compare the results with the ones obtained for ZnO nanorods grown by ACG.

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