May 14, 2021 |
Emergence of a new heteronanostructure library
(Nanowerk News) Organizing functional objects in a complex, sophisticated architecture at the nanoscale can yield hybrid materials that tremendously outperform their solo objects, offering exciting routes towards a spectrum of applications. The development in synthetic chemistry over past decades has enabled a library of hybrid nanostructures, such as core-shell, patchy, dimer, and hierarchical/branched ones.
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Nevertheless, the material combinations of these non-van der Waals solids are largely limited by the rule of lattice-matched epitaxy.
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A research team led by professor YU Shuhong at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has reported a new class of heteronanostructures they term axial superlattice nanowires (ASLNWs), which allow large lattice-mismatch tolerance and thus vast material combinations.
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The research article was published in Journal of the American Chemical Society ("One-Dimensional Superlattice Heterostructure Library").
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To achieve the predictable, high-precision synthesis of a library of ASLNWs, they designed an axial encoding methodology that enables regiospecificity for chemoselective transformation.
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They started from a predesigned, reconfigurable nanoscale framework, and then chemically decoupled the adjacent sub-objects by exploiting the reaction thermodynamics and kinetics. In this way, they achieved a library of nine distinct ASLNWs with in principle numerous geometric derivatives.
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By regulating the reaction selectivity, they were capable of on demand programming the compositions, dimensions, crystal phases, interfaces, and periodicity in ASLNWs. Thanks to such high-level control, they finally achieved superior photocatalytic performances using optimized ASLNWs.
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The results sheds new lights on creating high-order nanostructures with increased complexity and improved functions, which would show significant impacts on a broad range of applications in solar energy conversion and optoelectronics.
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