Abstract

Polyoxometalate nanostructures have attracted extensive interests due to the significant technical demands such as catalysts, sensors and smart windows. Thus, researchers have developed many methods for synthesis of these nanomaterials in the recent years. However, those techniques have many visible flaws, e.g. high temperature or high pressure environment, various templates or additives, demanding complicated synthetic procedures and causing impurities in final products, and so on. For this issue, in here, we propose a general strategy for fabricating polyoxometalate nanostructures: electrochemistry assisted laser ablation in liquid (ECLAL) [1-2]. This is a green, simple, and catalyst-free approach under the ambient environment. Besides these merits, this novel technique allows researchers to choose and design interesting solid target and electrochemistry approach to fabricate nanostructures of polyoxometalate compounds for purpose of fundamental research and potential applications. Taking the synthesis of Cu₃Mo₂O₉ nanorods as an example, we substantiate the validity of the proposed strategy above. Aiming at the fabrication of Cu₃Mo₂O₉ nanostructure, we choose molybdenum as a solid target of laser ablation in liquid and copper as electrodes of electrochemical reaction in ECLAL, and successfully fabricate Cu₃(OH)₂(MoO₄)₂ nanorods with magnetic properties.

© 2013 IEEE