Journal
CHEMISTRY OF MATERIALS
Volume 34, Issue 11, Pages 4910-4923Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.2c00097
Keywords
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Funding
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/L015285/1, EP/R018820/1, EP/T006331/1]
- European Research Council (ERC) [788968]
- European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) [ID22]
- European Research Council (ERC) [788968] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
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Incorporating cationic additives within inorganic single crystals offers a unique strategy for creating nanocomposites with tailored properties. This approach allows for the successful incorporation of various guest components within the crystals, resulting in nanocomposites with new functional properties. Cationic additives outperform their acidic counterparts in terms of colloidal stability and affinity for crystal surfaces, making them highly effective in a wider range of crystal systems.
Incorporation of guest additives within inorganic single crystals offers a unique strategy for creating nanocomposites with tailored properties. While anionic additives have been widely used to control the properties of crystals, their effective incorporation remains a key challenge. Here, we show that cationic additives are an excellent alternative for the synthesis of nanocomposites, where they are shown to deliver exceptional levels of incorporation of up to 70 wt % of positively charged amino acids, polymer particles, gold nanoparticles, and silver nanoclusters within inorganic single crystals. This high additive loading endows the nanocomposites with new functional properties, including plasmon coupling, bright fluorescence, and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Cationic additives are also shown to outperform their acidic counterparts, where they are highly active in a wider range of crystal systems, owing to their outstanding colloidal stability in the crystallization media and strong affinity for the crystal surfaces. This work demonstrates that although often overlooked, cationic additives can make valuable crystallization additives to create composite materials with tailored composition-structure-property relationships. This versatile and straightforward approach advances the field of single-crystal composites and provides exciting prospects for the design and fabrication of new hybrid materials with tunable functional properties.
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