Chemical Modulation of Metal–Insulator Transition toward Multifunctional Applications in Vanadium Dioxide Nanostructures

Abstract The metal–insulator transition (MIT) of vanadium dioxide (VO₂) has been of great interest in materials science for both fundamental understanding of strongly correlated physics and a wide range of applications in optics, thermotics, spintronics, and electronics. Due to the merits of chemical interaction with accessibility, versatility, and tunability, chemical modification provides a new perspective to regulate the MIT of VO₂, endowing VO₂ with exciting properties and improved functionalities. In the past few years, plenty of efforts have been devoted to exploring innovative chemical approaches for the synthesis and MIT modulation of VO₂ nanostructures, greatly contributing to the understanding of electronic correlations and development of MIT‐driven functionalities. Here, this comprehensive review summarizes the recent achievements in chemical synthesis of VO₂ and its MIT modulation involving hydrogen incorporation, composition engineering, surface modification, and electrochemical gating. The newly appearing phenomena, mechanism of electronic correlation, and structural instability are discussed. Furthermore, progresses related to MIT‐driven applications are presented, such as the smart window, optoelectronic detector, thermal microactuator, thermal radiation coating, spintronic device, memristive, and neuromorphic device. Finally, the challenges and prospects in future research of chemical modulation and functional applications of VO₂ MIT are also provided.