Chapter 2: Designing and Controllable Fabrication

In recent decades, ZnO nanostructures have attracted a great deal of attention due to the variety of possible morphologies, large surface-to-volume ratios, simple and low cost processing, and excellent physical properties for fabricating high performance electronic, magnetic and optoelectronic devices. ZnO nanostructures can be synthesised by several physical and chemical methods, such as vapour phase transport, pulsed laser ablation, molecular beam epitaxy, electrochemical, metal–organic chemical vapour deposition and hydrothermal synthesis methods. The classification of such preparation methods is done according to the physical or chemical changes, growth mechanism and the types of preparation methods or phases. Depending on the growth mechanism, it can be classified as vapour–liquid–solid growth, vapour–solid growth, solution–liquid–solid growth, dislocations induced growth, polar surface induced growth, and template assisted growth etc. Depending on the type of fabrication phase, it can be classified as vapour-phase method, liquid-phase method, and solid-phase method etc. This chapter concentrates on recent advances regarding the controllable synthesis of ZnO nanostructures, including a brief overview of the vapour phase transport method and solution method.