ABSTRACT
The ambient metastability of the rock-salt phase in well-defined model systems comprising nanospheres or nanorods of cadmium selenide, cadmium sulfide, or both was investigated as a function of composition, initial crystal phase, particle structure, shape, surface functionalization, and ordering level of their assemblies. Our experiments show that these nanocrystal systems exhibit ligand-tailorable reversibility in the rock salt-to-zinc blende solid-phase transformation. Interparticle sintering was used to engineer kinetic barriers in the phase transformation to produce ambient-pressure metastable rock-salt structures in a controllable manner. Interconnected nanocrystal networks were identified as an essential structure that hosted metastable high-energy phases at ambient conditions. These findings suggest general rules for transformation-barrier engineering that are useful in the rational design of next-generation materials.
ABSTRACT
Electrochromic devices with controllable color switching, low cost, and energy-saving advantages have been widely used as smart windows, rear-view car mirrors, displays, and so on. However, the devices are seriously limited for flexible electronics as they are traditionally fabricated on indium tin oxide (ITO) substrates which will lose their conductivity after bending cycles (the resistance significantly changed from 200 Ω to 6.56 MΩ when the bending radius was 1.2 cm). Herein, we report a new route for large area coassembly of nanowires (NWs), resulting in the formation of multilayer ordered nanowire (NW) networks with tunable conductivity (7-40 Ω/sq) and transmittance (58-86% at 550 nm) for fabrication of flexible transparent electrochromic devices, showing good stability of electrochromic switching behaviors. The electrochromic performance of the devices can be tuned and is strongly dependent on the structures of the Ag and W18O49 NW assemblies. Unlike the ITO-based electronics, the electrochromic films can be bent to a radius of 1.2 cm for more than 1000 bending cycles without obvious failure of both conductivity (ΔR/R ≈ 8.3%) and electrochromic performance (90% retention), indicating the excellent mechanical flexibility. The present method for large area coassembly of NWs can be extended to fabricate various NW-based flexible devices in the future.
ABSTRACT
Template-directed synthesis of nanostructures has been emerging as one of the most important synthetic methodologies. A pristine nanotemplate is usually chemically transformed into other compounds and sacrificed after templating or only acts as an inert physical template to support the new components. If a nanotemplate is costly or toxic as waste, to recycle such a nanotemplate becomes highly desirable. Recently, ultrathin tellurium nanowires (TeNWs) have been demonstrated as versatile chemical or physical templates for the synthesis of a diverse family of uniform 1D nanostructures. However, ultrathin TeNWs as template are usually costly and are discarded as toxic waste in ionic species after chemical reactions or erosion. To solve the above problem, we conceptually demonstrate that such a nanotemplate can be economically recycled from waste solutions and repeatedly used as template.
