I have synthesized ZnO. Attached please find the XRD. From HRTEM, I confirmed that the exposed crystal plane is (002). I want to know which crystal plane is more reactive in ZnO and how we can confirm it? Also, what is the difference in between the crystal plane from XRD and the exposed facets? Are they the same thing? How can we know about the surface energy of different planes in ZnO? I would be grateful if someone can help me in this.
without a proper modelling of the diffraction pattern is quite hard to understand if the local TEM observation is valid also on a larger scale (the domains sampled by XRD).
You can confirm by XRD that you have faceting, but only if your specimen is well behaving: if you have some nasty distribution of size and/or shape then the information is smeared out.
You can find some correlation between the XRD result and the exposed facets, but only if you have some controlled shape of the particles and if each particle is monocrystalline. In that case the shape of the peaks bear the information. On the other hand, if you have a crystalline powder, you see all hkls corresponding to all planes accessible to the experiment (they depend on wavelength and data collection range)
If you like to know about the reactivity of a specific plane you do need several single crystals (of different orientation) and perform adsorbation experiments i think. Using spectroscopic tools you can evaluate it. Maybe you find some helpful information in this review article: C. Wöll: The chemistry and physics of zinc oxide surfaces, Prog. Surf. Sci. 82 (2007) 55–120.
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