Low-temperature reactions are a powerful approach to generate new transition metal oxides that are inaccessible by conventional high-temperature reactions. In this review, we describe the recent progress of the topochemical reduction method using metal hydrides for transition metal oxides, in particular, focusing on structural modifications (relations), chemical and physical properties, and the factors that direct selective and rational preparations. The hydride reduction has been so far extensively applied to 3d transition metal perovskite oxides, yielding highly reduced products with unusual coordination environment (e.g., FeO 4 square-planar coordination), and extremely low-valent metal centers (e.g., Mn(I) and Co(I)). Non-perovskite oxides like pyrochlore and hexagonal perovskite can be also reduced. Moreover, this method allows access to oxyhydride materials (LaSrCoO 3 H 0.7 and BaTiO 3¹x H x ) that are promising for use as hydride ion conductors. Morphology-controlled oxides (thin film-and nano-oxides) are useful targets for hydride reduction, opening new possibilities for extending functions.
Ç IntroductionTransition metal (TM) oxides like spinel and perovskite oxides represent a variety of exotic and useful chemical and physical properties that include magnetoresistance, multiferroics, superconductivity, photocatalysis, thermoelectricity, and so on.17 These properties are closely related to the valence, spinstate, coordination of transition metal centers, and how they are connected to form an extended network. In order to achieve improved or new properties, cation chemistry has been often executed. For example, tuning the MnOMn bridging angle in LaMnO 3 by rare-earth substitution induces a large multiferroic responce.8 However, conventional solid-state synthesis at high temperature produces only thermodynamically stable products and permits limited access to structural modifications.Low-temperature reactions have attracted recent attention owing to its kinetics-driven nature, providing, in principle, rational and predictable design of structures and compositions as a metastable product. Ion-exchange reaction is such a process, which is found in minerals (e.g., clay), and is also of technological and industrial importance since nearly a century ago. Intercalation (deintercalation) reactions involve reactive species to be inserted into (extracted from) a host compound. The important feature in these soft chemical reactions is that the structural framework remains unchanged when comparing the starting and final compounds during the reaction. Therefore, if a suitable reaction condition (precursor material, reactant, temperature, etc.) is chosen, one may obtain a desired structure and composition with novel functionalities.TM perovskite ABO 3 oxides (Figure 1a) have high tolerance to oxygen deficiency (ABO 3¹¤ ), as found in SrFeO 3¹¤ and LaNiO 3¹¤ . 11,12 Increase of the oxygen content in the perovskiterelated cuprate YBa 2 Cu 3 O 7¹¤ (0¯¤¯1) gives rise to drastic change in the ground states, from ...