Abstract

Controlled Synthesis of Water Soluble Micrometer Sized Highly Luminescent Zinc Sulfide Flowers Using Green Chemistry Approach and Their Characterization

Author(s): Arun S, Kameswara Rao V, Shrivastava AR, Sanjay U and Deepika

In the present study, highly luminescent zinc sulfide (ZnS) flowers were fabricated using facile green chemistry route and characterized. The beauty of green-chemistry synthetic route is that it is relatively simple, easy to handle, convenient, inexpensive, low energy consumption, does not require large area, demanding no extreme pressure or temperature control and requiring no complicated apparatus/special equipment which make this technique more suitable than other existing synthesis methods. The formation of ZnS flowers was confirmed by various characterization techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), electron dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDAX), zeta-potential, dynamic light scattering (DLS), ultraviolet visible spectroscopy (UV-VIS) and photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL). The systematic formation of ZnS microstructures to be appearing like flowers was discussed in this paper. Using this method, it is easy to prepare three-dimensional flower like ZnS (average size ~882 nm) containing nanoparticles of size less than 4 nm. Even though the total size of ZnS flowers was in submicron range, the thickness of petals is in the nanometer range. The flowers were indeed made up of nano-ZnS particles. To the best of our knowledge, till now nobody has reported these attractive flowers like ZnS structures in the range of micrometer. The present study provides a new avenue to gain in-depth insight to the design of highly luminescent ZnS flowers.