Solvothermal methods in which nanoparticle precursors react at elevated temperature and pressure in solvent mixtures that combine alcohols and water produce nanomaterials of high crystallinity for a broad range of transition metal oxides. However, ternary metal oxide nanocrystals are difficult to synthesize as phase-pure materials using these methods because the simple metal salts commonly used as precursors tend to form product mixtures containing both binary and ternary oxide phases that are difficult to separate. This poster presents new insights into the synthesis of phase-pure ternary metal oxide nanocrystals via a solvothermal method using mixed-metal, homoleptic clusters of the general formula MIIFeIII2(μ3-O)(μ2-O2CR)6(L)3 (L=THF or H2O) as model single-source precursors for metal ferrite spinel nanoparticles, which have the general formula MIIFeIII2O4 (M=Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn). These spinel ferrites are attractive materials for photocatalytic hydrogen generation, dye degradation, and CO2 reduction due to their low cost, small bandgaps, and electrochemical stability. Accessing colloidal nanocrystals of these materials may provide opportunities to explore structure/function relationships between morphology and surface chemistry and the optoelectronic properties and chemical reactivity of these materials. Compared to mixtures of nitrate salts, nanocrystals made using the clusters as single-source precursors have narrower size distributions. The role of electron-donating and electron-withdrawing substituents (R) on the carboxylate ligands of the heterobimetallic precursor compounds was found to be crucial for obtaining different nanoparticle morphologies while maintaining the spinel crystal phase for all the colloidal nanocrystals.

Single-Source Precursors: A Springboard to the Synthesis of Monodisperse Metal Ferrite Nanocrystals

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