Photoluminescence quenching in cobalt doped ZnO nanocrystals

Influence of cobalt doping on the luminescence properties of ZnO nanocrystals with average diameter of 3.0 nm is investigated. Time resolved measurements at 20 K show that the dark exciton luminescence is completely lost in the nanocrystals doped with cobalt, while the perturbed luminescence with slight red shift survives and exhibits a non-exponential decay curve reflecting random distribution of cobalt atoms. By analyzing the non-exponentiality, the increase of the decay rate of the band-edge luminescence induced by the inclusion of single cobalt atom is estimated to be 0.012 ps-1