Biomolecule-assisted synthesis of single-crystalline selenium nanowires and nanoribbons via a novel flake-cracking mechanism

Recently, the biomolecule-assisted synthesis method has been a new and promising focus in the preparation of various nanomaterials. But current works mainly focus on the synthesis of metal nanoparticles and nanowires using macro-biomolecules (e.g. virus, protein and DNA) as templates in the presence of a reducing agent. Beta-carotene, one of the most common bio-antioxidants, can be oxidized to form species with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic ends, which can provide an in situ soft template for the synthesis of nanomaterials. Herein, a simple beta-carotene-assisted method was developed for the first time to synthesize t-Se nanowires and nanoribbons with high crystallinity. We demonstrate that beta-carotene serves as not only the reducing agent, but also an in situ template in the preparation of Se one-dimensional nanostructures. It is found that the growth mechanism of Se nanomaterials is different from the familiar sphere-wire process. A novel flake-cracking mechanism is proposed. By this biomolecule-assisted route, Te one-dimensional nanostructures and Pd nanowires were also fabricated. The assisted-biomolecule in our method may be spread to carotenoids and other antioxidants, and thus broaden the application fields of biomolecules. Our preliminary investigations have shown that the facile, solution-phase biomolecule-assisted method can be potentially extended to the preparation of other low-dimensional nanostructures. The synthesized t-Se nanowires and nanoribbons may serve as templates to generate other tubular functional nanomaterials and find applications in the studies of structure-property relationships as well as in the fabrication of nanoscale optoelectronic devices.