PLANAR DEFECTS IN ZnO NANOBELTS

Planar defects are the most popular and most important defects in nanobelts.In some cases,the presence of planar defects is essential for stabilizing the surfaces that exhibit higher energies and leading the fastest anisotropic growth of the nanobelts along a specific direction.Planar defects can be twins/bicrystals,stacking faults and/or interstitial stacking layer introduced by impurity atoms.In this paper,we review the planar defects observed in ZnO nanobelts by transmission electron microscopy.Two types of twin/bicrystal structures with twining planes as(0113) and(2112) have been identified.The observed basal-plane stacking faults can be classified into type I_1 and I_2.In large sized ZnO nanobelts,the I_1 basal-plane stacking fault can fold from basal plane to(2110) plane to form the prismatic-plane stacking fault.By doping indium ions and with the accumulating of these indium ions in the basal-plane,two types of inversion domain walls or boundaries have been introduced in the ZnO nanobelts.