Formation and morphological investigation of petal-like cadmium sulphide nanostructures

Abstract We investigate the effect of temperature in the formation of hexagonal shaped CdS nanocrystals in the presence of N-Methylaniline (NMA) as a capping agent. At room temperature petal-like CdS nanostructures are formed in the presence of the capping agent. These petal-like CdS nanostructures are composed of spherical nanocrystals. At high temperature these structures transform to clusters. These clusters are composed of hexagonal shaped CdS nanocrystals. The reaction temperature is found to play an important role in the shape evolution of the nanoparticles. XRD patterns of the NMA capped CdS synthesized at 120 °C exhibits peaks corresponding to hexagonal as well as cubic phase of CdS. The optical measurements indicated tunable optical properties of the CdS nanoparticles. The hexagonal shaped CdS nanoparticles exhibited broad and split peaks at 405 nm and 426 nm. A possible formation mechanism is proposed for the petal like structures, based on the experimental results.