Phosphine-free synthesis from 1D Pb(OH)Cl nanowires to 0D and 1D PbSe nanocrystals

In this paper, we report a new phosphine-free, low-cost, low-temperature colloidal method of controlled synthesis of PbSe nanocrystals in both zero-dimension (0D) and one-dimension (1D). Different from the widely used "hot injection" method and "nonprecursor injection" method, the novelty of this new method is that it does not require a nucleation process. Instead, high-quality presynthesized 1D Pb(OH)Cl nanowires (∼80 to ∼160 nm in diameter) can be directly used as a Pb precursor and reacted with a Se precursor to form monodisperse dot-shaped 0D cubic PbSe and 1D orthorhombic PbSe nanowires. 0D cubic PbSe nanocrystals begin to form at elevated temperatures after the Se precursor is added to react with Pb(OH)Cl nanowires. By prolonging the reaction time for 3 h, good self-assembled 0D cubic PbSe nanocrystals can be synthesized with an average diameter of about 15 nm. Furthermore, such method has been demonstrated to synthsize high-quality 1D PbSe nanowires successfully with temperature as low as 110 °C. 1D PbSe nanowires possess a mean diameter of 15-24 nm with the shortest and longest length from 600 nm to 5 μm. The only sharp and strong peak, which is consistent with characteristic peaks of orthorhombic PbSe, indicates that the nanowires' elongation axis is in the [111] direction, and 0D cubic PbSe nanocrystals change to 1D orthorhombic PbSe nanowires completely.