High-Temperature Plateau–Rayleigh Growth of Beaded SiC/SiO2 Nanochain Heterostructures

Yanhui Chu, Siyi Jing, Xiang Yu, Yunlong Zhao

Index: 10.1021/acs.cgd.8b00057

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Abstract

The Plateau–Rayleigh (P-R) crystal growth was recently proposed and dramatically extended the one-dimensional nanomaterials synthesis due to its tunable morphological features. Previously reported P-R growth is mainly focused on the relative low-temperature reactions (<1273 K, which is less than the melting point of reaction products or intermediate products), while high-temperature P-R growth with a molten state is rarely studied. To extend P-R growth to high temperature and reveal the underlying mechanism, herein we take the synthesis of SiC/SiO2 heterostructures as the prototype. With optimized growth temperature, we reported a novel high-temperature P-R growth of the beaded SiC/SiO2 nanochain heterostructures through a vapor-phase synthesis. The as-obtained SiC/SiO2 nanochain heterostructures involved the single-crystalline 3C-SiC core with diameters of ∼20 nm, the amorphous SiO2 shell with thicknesses of 200–300 nm, and many uniform periodic amorphous SiO2 beads with diameters of 800–1000 nm. Further experiments and thermodynamics analysis reveal that the saturated vapor pressure and viscosity of the intermediate product SiO play a key role in this growth. This study not only provides a novel extension of P-R growth with the synthesis of SiC/SiO2 heterostructures but also reveals the significance of the saturated vapor pressure and viscosity of the intermediate product in the high-temperature P-R growth. It is expected that such findings will facilitate the applications of one-dimensional nanomaterials synthesis.