Synthesis and raman property of porous jujube-like Cu₂O hierarchy structure

Structural engineering of nanocrystals is of great importance to control the properties of semiconductor oxides. Here, we present a mild wet chemical reduction route to obtain a sub-micron porous jujube-like Cu₂O hierarchy structure. Sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (SDBS) is crucial in structural regulation and it acts as a soft template and a capping agent. The jujube-like particle consists of crystal grains less than 10 nm in size as verified by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). A set of time control experiments were carried out to study the evolution of the jujube-like structure. Interestingly, we found that altering the amount of added HCl resulted in a size-tuning effect of changing the size of the particles from approximately 300 to 900 nm. Based on these results, we propose a possible growth-etching competition mechanism to explain the formation of the hollow interior and its porous nature, which also agrees with the sizing-tuning effect. The optical properties were analyzed using Raman spectroscopy. By comparison with a conventional sub-micron solid polyhedral we found a novel Raman property for the porous jujube-like Cu₂O. Our research complements the library of Cu₂O Raman spectra, which is meaningful for the nondestructive examination of pigments on the surface of antiques by Raman techniques.