A novel approach to synthesis and characterization of biocompatible zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles

Zinc Oxide nanoparticles (ZnO) being biocompatible and chemically stable have great potential for bio-medical applications that includes anti-bacterial and mold prevention, air ventilation and purification, water purification, self cleaning and photosynthesis, and disease detection. Also ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor and exhibits piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties, which makes it a perfect candidate for building electrochemically coupled sensors and transducers. With all these unique properties, ZnO has the potential to be very important nanomaterial in material research area. Therefore, research, development, and production of ZnO nanoparticles would make notable contributions to the field of nanotechnology. In this paper we report a novel approach for the fabrication of ZnO nanoparticles suspension in deionized water at room temperature using pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. Particle size was controlled by the number of shots of the laser beam used. Characterization of the nanoparticles has been done using UV-Visible spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and dynamic light scattering (DLS). UV-Visible study confirmed the existence of ZnO nanoparticles showing a peak at around 300 nm which is consistent with the absorption spectra of standard ZnO nanoparticles. Presence of ZnO was reconfirmed by the excitation and emission spectra obtained from fluorescence spectroscopy. The excitation and emission peaks were found at 305 nm and 410 nm respectively, strongly suggesting the characteristic peaks for ZnO nanoparticles. Transmission electron microscope (TEM) photographs established that we have successfully prepared ZnO nanoparticles suspension with particle size ranging from 6 nm to 90 nm. © 2009 Materials Research Society