Layered metal oxides including MoO3 and WO3 have been widely explored for biological applications owing to their excellent biocompatibility, low toxicity, and easy preparation. However, they normally exhibit weak or negligible near‐infrared (NIR) absorption and thus are inefficient for photo‐induced biomedical applications. Herein, the structural engineering of layered MoO3 and WO3 nanostructures is first reported to activate their NIR‐II absorption for efficient photothermal cancer therapy in the NIR‐II window. White‐colored micrometre‐long MoO3 nanobelts are transformed into blue‐colored short, thin, defective, interlayer gap‐expanded MoO3−x nanobelts with a strong NIR‐II absorption via the simple lithium treatment. The blue MoO3−x nanobelts exhibit a large extinction coefficient of 18.2 L g−1 cm−1 and high photothermal conversion efficiency of 46.9% at 1064 nm. After surface modification, the MoO3−x nanobelts can be used as a robust nanoagent for photoacoustic imaging‐guided photothermal therapy to achieve efficient cancer cell ablation and tumor eradication under irradiation by a 1064 nm laser. Importantly, the biodegradable MoO3−x nanobelts can be rapidly degraded and excreted from body. The study highlights that the structural engineering of layered metal oxides is a powerful strategy to tune their properties and thus boost their performances in given applications.
We demonstrate that l‐methionine, a natural amino acid, can be used to dramatically enhance CO2 uptake kinetics in the formation of CO2 hydrate without the use of energy‐intensive mixing technologies or environmentally harmful chemicals. To the best of our knowledge, l‐methionine is the most effective promoter to enhance CO2 hydrate formation (at a concentration of 0.2 wt %, the gravimetric capacity reached up to 356 mg g−1 in 1000 min, and t90 (the time to achieve 90 % of this capacity) was only 15 min). We also present a tentative explanation for the promotion mechanism of l‐methionine in the formation of CO2 hydrate from the point of view of structure–property relationship that will help search for more effective promoters. Our results may offer the possibility of practical application of hydrate‐based CO2 capture and storage technology.
The lack of stable p-type van der Waals (vdW) semiconductors with high hole mobility severely impedes the step of low-dimensional materials entering the industrial circle. Although p-type black phosphorus (bP) and tellurium (Te) have shown promising hole mobilities, the instability under ambient conditions of bP and relatively low hole mobility of Te remain as daunting issues. Here we report the growth of high-quality Te nanobelts on atomically flat hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) for high-performance p-type field-effect transistors (FETs). Importantly, the Te-based FET exhibits an ultrahigh hole mobility up to 1370 cm2 V−1 s−1 at room temperature, that may lay the foundation for the future high-performance p-type 2D FET and metal–oxide–semiconductor (p-MOS) inverter. The vdW h-BN dielectric substrate not only provides an ultra-flat surface without dangling bonds for growth of high-quality Te nanobelts, but also reduces the scattering centers at the interface between the channel material and the dielectric layer, thus resulting in the ultrahigh hole mobility "Image missing".
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