Structural and magnetic property studies on low temperature chemically synthesised one-dimensional Zn 12x Ni x O nanorods G. Mohan Kumar • P. Ilanchezhiyan • S. Poongothai • Jinsub Park • R. Jayavel Received: 25 October 2013 / Accepted: 15 January 2014 / Published online: 29 January 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract One-dimensional Zn 1-x Ni x O nanorods have been established through a facile surfactant/template free low temperature hydrothermal route, which involves the direct growth of the nanorod-like structures from an aqueous alkaline phase. The monophasic wurtzite structure of the Ni-doped ZnO nanocrystallites were initially studied using the X-ray diffractograms and their rod-like mor- phological appearance and homogeneity were analyzed through the aid of electron microscopes. Moreover, the substitution of Ni ions was found to contain the oxygen related vacancies and defect states in the nanostructures, through suppressing the E 2 (high) and E 1 (LO) modes in the Raman spectra. A similar trend was also observed in the subband gap emission, over the visible region of the emission spectra. The magnetic property studies on the Zn 1-x Ni x O semiconducting nanorods revealed the pre- sence of paramagnetic characteristics at room temperature and antiferromagnetic interactions at 20 K. 1 Introduction Recently, extensive works have been carried on to identify an efficient dilute magnetic semiconductor (DMS), for its potential applications in spin-polarized light emitting diodes, transistors, non-volatile memory devices and sensor related applications especially [1–4]. The giant magneto- resistance property of such materials actually helps us to visualize the same through the aid of their resistivity val- ues, which varies drastically as a function of the applied magnetic field. The existence of ferromagnetic property at/ above room temperature in a material is one of the crucial criteria required to realize DMS based devices. In this regard, II–VI semiconductors like ZnO while doped with transition metal ions have been identified as a promising DMS material, where their magnetic and transport prop- erties get combined to offer potential applications. The added advantage of ZnO ensures us to control their charge and spin concentrations independently via changing the dopant concentration of transition metal elements like Mn, Co, Fe, Ni, etc. [5–8]. So, it is these transition metal ions that bring out the novel and new interesting properties, while substituted in the host lattice. Additionally, the properties of such semiconducting nanomaterials and its applications are also determined by their morphology, structure, organization of nanostructured architectures and their preparation techniques [9, 10]. So far, the wurtzite Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10854-014-1736-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. G. Mohan Kumar (&)  J. Park Department of Electronic Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea e-mail: selvi1382@gmail.com P. Ilanchezhiyan (&) Quantum-Functional Semiconductor Research Centre, Dongguk University, Seoul, Republic of Korea e-mail: ilanchezhiyan@gmail.com S. Poongothai Department of Physics, Vivekanandha College of Technology, Namakkal, India J. Park Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea R. Jayavel Centre for Nanoscience and Technology, Anna University, Chennai, India 123 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron (2014) 25:1369–1375 DOI 10.1007/s10854-014-1736-2