By simply applying an electric current across a graphene oxide (GO) film, GO can be easily recovered to produce reduced GO (RGO). The resulting RGO film can be used as efficient gap electrodes in organic photoswitching devices, which display comparable efficiency to those using Au as gap electrodes.

Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) have attracted tremendous interest and become a worldwide research hotpot owing to their low cost and abundant resources. To obtain suitable anode materials with excellent performance for SIBs, an effective and controllable strategy is presented to fabricate SnS nanosheets coating on nanohollow cubic CoS /C (CoS /C@SnS ) composites with a hollow structure using Co-metal-organic frameworks as the starting material. As anodes for SIBs, the CoS /C@SnS electrode exhibits ultralong cycle life and excellent rate performance, which can maintain a high specific capacity of 400.1 mAh g even after 3500 cycles at a current density of 10 A g . When used in a full-cell, it also shows enhanced sodium storage properties and delivers a high reversible capacity of 567.3 mAh g after 1000 cycles at 1 A g . This strategy can pave a way for preparing various metal sulfides with fascinating structure and excellent performance for the potential application in energy storage area.

In this article, we developed an effective approach to generate gold nanoflowers (AuNFs) by vesicles made from a series of gemini amphiphiles (G2-G10) with different spacer lengths. The gemini amphiphiles were found to form vesicles in aqueous solution. Upon mixing with vesicles in the presence of AgNO(3), HAuCl(4) could be reduced into gold nanoflowers by ascorbic acid. The vesicles directed the growth of the AuNFs, and the spacer length of the gemini amphiphiles showed obvious control of the morphology and optical properties of the formed AuNFs. At a lower HAuCl(4) concentration, the minimum-sized AuNFs were formed when vesicles from the amphiphile with a spacer length of 4 were applied. Upon increasing the spacer length, branched nanoflowers are predominantly produced. A seed-growth mechanism together with the conformational change of the spacer of the gemini amphiphiles was proposed according to the studies on reaction processes. In addition, the formed gold nanoflowers showed obvious surface-enhanced Raman scattering activity for R6G. The present method provided an efficient, controllable way to synthesize branched gold nanostructures.