Nanocrystalline Metal Chalcogenides Obtained Open to Air: Synthesis, Morphology, Mechanism, and Optical Properties

Nanocrystalline metal chalcogenide (selenide/sulfide/telluride) semiconductors make great sense in the photoelectric applications. Since the size and shape of the nanomaterials have a strong influence oil their properties, new methods with high feasibility are always expected for the synthesis of chalcogenides with different dimension and morphology. In the present work, a green acetate-paraffin route was introduced that is suitable for the preparation of different chalcogenides, such as PbSe, Cu2Se, ZnSe, CdSe, NiSe2, CoSe, ZnS, Cu7.2S4, and PbTe. All the experiment processes were conducted open to air. These chalcogenides show various morphologies like grains, nanospheres, nanoplates, and so on, A mechanism was proposed to explain the formation of the different chalcogenide nanostructures. The dimension and shape of the nanostructures are dependent both oil the crystal structure and the action of oleic acid oil the growth rate of crystal faces. The optical properties of the prepared chalcogenides were characterized by the UV-visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV-DRS) and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy.