Heterostructured Nanomaterials: Latest Trends in Formation of Inorganic Heterostructures

Photoactive Heterostructures: How They Are Made and Explored

“…Widely used examples of chemical methods are sol-gel synthesis (including film formation by dip-coating and spin-coating methods from sols), synthesis in micelles (microemulsion approach), high temperature solid-state reaction, chemical precipitation or coprecipitation, chemical bath deposition, etc., i.e., facile methods of wet chemistry. These methods are reviewed in detail elsewhere [26][27][28][29]44,48,51,53]. Chemical precipitation carried out in an aqueous solution is straightforward and readily upgraded to an industrial scale [56][57][58].…”

“…This group includes solvothermal synthesis (sometimes ultrasound-assisted) [27,28,44,51,53,63], microwave-assisted synthesis [26][27][28]44,53], photodeposition [29,44,64], synthesis in supercritical solvents [65], aerosol pyrolysis (spray pyrolysis and laser pyrolysis) [26,27,53,66], chemical exfoliation [53], and methods for nanoparticle or film growth from the gas phase (chemical vapor deposition [26,27,44,51,53,67], atomic layer deposition [48], etc. ), the growth of nanostructures by the liquid-crystal mechanism (hot injection [29], successive ionic layer adsorption (SILAR) [29,68] and other methods of layer-bylayer deposition [26,28,44,69]).…”

“…The fabrication of some hierarchical composite structures, such as core-shell [26,44,66,76] and hollow [44,77] structures, requires an application of the specialized synthetic techniques. The template-assisted method is worth mentioning [44,78].…”

“…At least one of the components must be a semiconductor (or dielectric) that provides a condition for sufficiently long life-time for the excited state of the heterostructure which is necessary to initiate a further chemical sequence. The AB heterostructures can be classified based on the configuration and dimensions of the interface between two components, A and B, as follows (see Figure 1): one-dimensional (1D), two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) heterostructures [25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. In a one-dimensional heterostructure, the interface is of line-like shape, that is, the contact area is extended in one direction and not expanded in two others.…”

NaNbO3/NaTaO3 Superlattices: Cation-Ordering Improved Band-Edge Alignment for Water Splitting and CO2 Photocatalysis

“…Heterostructures are semiconductor junctions composed of two or more building blocks which interact synergistically, providing the new material with unique multifunctional properties usually relevant for several applications such as photocatalysis, energy conversion and storage, and optoelectronics. − Particularly, perovskite oxide heterostructures show exceptional photoelectrochemical properties and have been recently used not only in nanoelectronics , but also in energy and environmental applications, as H 2 generation through water splitting photocatalysis and photocatalytic CO 2 reduction. − Because of interface-related phenomena, optical properties like the light absorption range can be tuned. Additionally, interface effects can promote a more effective charge separation and hinder the recombination of charge carriers, extending their lifetimes and improving the material’s photocatalytic activity. , …”