A green hydrothermal route to nanocrystalline CuCl

Abstract CuCl, a wide bandgap (Eg = 3.395 eV at 4 K) I–VII semiconductor with excitonic binding energies of about 190 meV, can be used in the manufacture of electrooptic modulators, optical filters, solid-state batteries, catalyst, adsorbent, air purifying agents, blue-UV light-emitting devices, etc. Although many methods have already been developed for synthesizing CuCl powders with different characteristics so far, all of them either need complicated equipment and high reaction temperatures, or utilize toxic reactants and organic solvent, or produce much pollutive byproducts. In this paper, we report a green hydrothermal way to prepare nanocrystalline CuCl powders, simply by using the reaction of CuCl2 and alpha- d -glucose in distilled water in an autoclave at 120 °C for 24 h. The obtained CuCl nanocrystals were characterized by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and their possible formation mechanism was also proposed.