Lithium silicates are one of the oldest and most wide-spread ceramic materials known. Because of their high natural abundancy and non-toxic nature, different crystal phases of lithium silicates show potential applications in carbon dioxide capture, stimulated Raman scattering, and energy storage. The high diffusivity of Li ions makes lithium silicate a competitive materials for lithium ion batteries. Syntheses of lithium silicate nanostructures has been reported by a number of techniques including solid-state mixing, sol–gel chemistry, ball milling, and pulsed laser ablation, where all methods utilize a definite ratio of lithium and silicon precursors depending on the desired crystal structure (i.e. orthorhombic, monoclinic and metaphase). These methods generally produce large size (&gt; 100 nm), polydisperse particles. Herein, we report a novel colloidal chemistry method using butyllithium and silicon tetraiodide as lithium and silicon precursors to produce small (5-20 nm), poorly-crystalline, and highly luminescent Li2SixOy nanoparticles, which crystallize to produce orthorhombic Li2SiO3 and monoclinic Li2Si2O5 upon annealing at 600 °C. A detailed study on physical and photophysical characterization of Li2SixOy nanostructures, supported by time-resolved photoluminescence and first-principal calculations will be discussed.

Colloidal synthesis of highly luminescent lithium silicate nanoparticles and their chemical transformation into different crystal structures

256th National Meeting (2018)

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