Oriented Nanocrystal Arrays of Selectable Polymorphs by Chemical Sculpture

Yang, Xianfeng and Karthik, Chinnathambi and Li, Xiuyan and Fu, Junxiang and Fu, Xionghui and Liang, Chaolun and Ravishankar, N and Wu, Mingmei and Ramanath, Ganapathiraman (2009) Oriented Nanocrystal Arrays of Selectable Polymorphs by Chemical Sculpture. In: Chemistry Of Materials, 21 (14). pp. 3197-3201.

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Abstract

Growing crystals with selected structure and preferred orientations oil seed substrates is crucial for a wide variety of applications. Although epitaxial or textured film growth of a polymorph whose structure resembles the seed crystal structure is well-known, growing oriented nanocrystal arrays or more than one polymorph, selectable one at a time, from the same seed has not been realized. Here, we demonstrate for the first time the exclusive growth of oriented nanocrystal arrays of two titania polymorphs from a titanate crystal by chemically activating respective polymorph-mimicking crystallographic facets in the seed. The oriented titania nanocrystal arrays exhibit significantly higher photocatalytic activity than randomly oriented polymorphs. Our approach of chemically sculpting oriented nanocrystal polymorph arrays could be adapted to other materials systems to obtain novel properties.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Chemistry Of Materials
Publisher:	American Chemical Society
Additional Information:	Copyrights of this article belongs to American Chemical Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Mechanical Sciences > Materials Engineering (formerly Metallurgy)
Date Deposited:	23 Dec 2009 07:36
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 05:40
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/22091

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