Synthesis of single-crystal niobium pentoxide nanobelts

Abstract In this study, we first developed a simple synthetic route to prepare layered structure NH4Nb3O8 nanobelts, and then converted NH4Nb3O8 phase to single-crystal Nb2O5 by thermal treatment in air. The lengths of the nanobelts range from several hundreds of nanometers to several tens of micrometers, and the thickness and width of nanobelts are ∼15 and ∼60 nm, respectively. Based on the experimental results, a possible mechanism for the formation of nanobelts was proposed. Such a simple synthetic route offers great opportunities for the scale-up preparation of one-dimensional nanostructured materials. Furthermore, the synthesized Nb2O5 nanobelts were successfully employed, for the first time, as an electrode material in dye-sensitized solar cells using a metal-free idoline dye as a sensitizer and its photovoltaic performance of the solar cells was investigated under illumination of simulated AM 1.5 solar light (100 mW cm−2).