Positively Charged Additives Facilitate Incorporation in Inorganic Single Crystals

摘要

Incorporation of guest additives within inorganic single crystals offers aunique strategy for creating nanocomposites with tailored properties. While anionicadditives have been widely used to control the properties of crystals, their effectiveincorporation remains a key challenge. Here, we show that cationic additives are anexcellent alternative for the synthesis of nanocomposites, where they are shown to deliverexceptional levels of incorporation of up to 70 wt of positively charged amino acids,polymer particles, gold nanoparticles, and silver nanoclusters within inorganic singlecrystals. This high additive loading endows the nanocomposites with new functionalproperties, including plasmon coupling, bright fluorescence, and surface-enhanced Ramanscattering (SERS). Cationic additives are also shown to outperform their acidiccounterparts, where they are highly active in a wider range of crystal systems, owing totheir outstanding colloidal stability in the crystallization media and strong affinity for thecrystal surfaces. This work demonstrates that although often overlooked, cationic additivescan make valuable crystallization additives to create composite materials with tailored composition-structure-propertyrelationships. This versatile and straightforward approach advances the field of single-crystal composites and provides excitingprospects for the design and fabrication of new hybrid materials with tunable functional properties.