Long lifetime of free excitons in ZnO tetrapod structures

Time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) is employed to characterize optical quality of ZnO tetrapods. PL decay of free excitons (FE) is concluded to contain two components with time constants of 1 and 14 ns at room temperature. The fast PL decay is attributed to nonradiative recombination whereas the slow decay is suggested to mainly represent FE radiative lifetime, based on correlation between thermally induced increases in the PL linewidth and FE lifetimes. The results underline superior optical quality of the tetrapods as the decay time of the slow PL component is comparable to the longest lifetimes reported to date for ZnO.