This study was conducted to investigate the effect of annealing temperature on undoped and zinc doped tin oxide nanoparticles synthesized by simple and cos effective
chemical method i.e. Sol-Gel technique. The XRD analysis confirmed the synthesis of
polycrystalline tin oxide nanoparticles with cubic structure. The crystallite size of undoped nanoparticles was found to be 2.6 nm, however the crystallite size for zinc
doped tin oxide nanoparticles annealed at 400 ̊C was found to be 5.2 nm. The SEM
analysis confirmed the growth of uniformly distributed almost spherical nanoparticles
for un-doped and zinc doped samples with an average particle size of 75 and 105 nm,
respectively. The optical properties revealed that prepared nanoparticles showed high
transmittance in the visible region. The band gap value for un- doped and zinc doped
tin oxide nanoparticles annealed at 400 ̊C is 3.75 and 3.63 eV, respectively. The
synthesized nanoparticles with tuned band gap might have potential applications in
sensors and opto-electronic devices.