Controlled fabrication of rare earth fluoride superstructures via a simple template-freeroute

Abstract

A new and simple route to fabricate rare earth metal fluoride superstructureshas been investigated. Typically, doughnut- and shuttle-shapedEuF3 superstructures were controllably synthesized by using sodium tetrafluoroborate(NaBF4) as a fluorine source to react with metal nitrate in aqueous solution under ambientconditions. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy(TEM) demonstrated that different superstructures can be obtained by changing theconcentration of the reactants. The photoluminescence (PL) spectra of the as-synthesizedEuF3 measured with an excitation source wavelength of 380 nm showed that the emissionintensity at different wavelengths can be adjusted by changing the morphology ofEuF3. Moreover, our experiments indicated that the fabrication of the rare earth metal fluoridesuperstructures could be readily scaled up to grams.