Synthesis And Application Of The Cuprous Sulfide Nanomaterials

Usually, the metal sulfides maybe are often misunderstood to be contaminants or hazardous substances. However, with the continuous development of science, scientists gradually found that metal sulfides played an important role in the areas of optics, optical chemistry, catalysis, environmental protection, and resultantly have been applied to all aspects of life due to their special and excellent properties. The copper oxides, which have many special optical properties, are important new class of inorganic functional materials in recent years and attracting great focus from the researchers. Nowadays, many articles are close related to the synthesis of various features of active copper oxide, cuprous oxide, including nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanorods, sheet and so on. However, as a congener of cuprous oxides, the research concerned on development of cuprous sulfide is rare.Cuprous sulfide (Cu2S) is a p-type semiconductor material with narrow band-gap of Eg=1.2-1.24eV. It has good chemical and thermal stability and is also a good optical-active material, which has great application potential in the solar cell, the field emission, nanoelectronic devices, thin film transistor display, optoelectronic chips, biosensors and other fields. Therefore, it is a promising semiconductor.In this paper, we used the hydrothermal/solvothermal method to synthesize cuprous sulfide nanostructures with cupric nitrate trihydrate [Cu(NO3)23H2O] and thiourea (NH2CSNH2) as raw materials, thioglycolic acid (TGA) as stabilizer, deionized water as the solvent. We used X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) to test crystal phase, chemical valence, morphology, and bonding information of the obtained material, respectively. In addition, we also employed UV-visible absorption spectroscopy (UV-Vis) and fluorescence spectroscopy (PL) to test the optical properties of nanostructures aiming to investigate the growth and luminescence mechanism, and give some reasonable explanations.Finally, this work also involved assembly of a multilayer cuprous sulfide nanoparticles film and tested its photoluminescence effect. The results indicated that the obtained cuprous sulfide nanoparticles exhibited excellent photoelectric performance.