Recent advances in hydrothermal syntheses of low dimensional nanoarchitectures

Abstract

Recently, considerable attention has been focused on low-dimensional nanomaterials owing to their unique physical properties and potential applications in sensors, magnetics, electric transportation, optics, and even as building blocks for nanoscale devices. The past couple of decades have witnessed the development on new mild soft solution based strategies for fabrication of low dimensional nanostructures. In particular, hydrothermal synthesis, as a traditional method but a good choice, has provided various general routes for the rational synthesis of a variety of low dimensional nanostructured materials such as nanorods, nanowires, nanosheets, nanotubes, and their assemblies with controllable size, shape, phase, length scale, and structural complexity. This review gives an overview of recent advances in hydrothermal syntheses of low dimensional nanoarchitectures. Recent progresses undoubtedly emphasise that a rich family of inorganic nanostructures can be accessible by this facile approach and their shape, size, and structures can be controlled. However, hydrothermal synthesis for rational design of nanomaterials is still at its infancy and far beyond its maturity even though this traditional approach has been studied for many years. The further understanding of the reaction kinetics and formation mechanics in this reaction system by taking advantage of various characterisation techniques will make this route become a mature and reliable technique in future for the rational design of diverse nanomaterials with expected well-defined shapes, sizes, phases, and compositions, and even with unique structural specialty and complexity. These new nanobuilding blocks of different functionalities will find potential applications in nanoscience and nanotechnology.