Synthesis of Advanced Materials following Wet Chemical Route(s)

Over the last two decades nanotechnological development have contributed enormously to the scientific and technological growth. Nanomaterials exhibiting size, shape and dimensionality dependent physicochemical properties have led to the development of novel strategies for the fabrication of new materials with enhanced features. Among these the wet chemical routes appears to hold more promise as regards to provide flexibility in designing of materials with diverse functionalities and tunable characteristics. In this context the present talk will focus on some of our recent work employing different chemical routes for the synthesis of varied class of nanomaterials comprising carbonaceous, inorganic semiconductor(s), metal(s), and their composites. Their surface modifications have been performed by using a varieties of organics/biotemplates and inorganics as capping agents and making their self-assembly, for enhancing their optical, optoelectronic, photophysics, conducting, magnetic, dielectric and surface properties. Some salient features of these nanomaterials are described below:
N functionalized as well as non-functionalized highly conducting ultra-thin graphene sheet(s) with fairly high value of specific capacitance at a current density of 10 A/g have been fabricated by performing the wet reduction of graphene oxide using different reducing agents.
Biotemplating of II-VI and IV-VI semiconductors and metal(s) yielded supramolecular directed nanostructures of varied dimension, morphologies and shapes. These nanostructures cover a wide optical and photophysical range covering UV-Vis-NIR (200-1200 nm) region with long emission lifetime of charge carriers. The gelification of colloidal iron oxide(s) could be achieved using nucleotides as templates yielding porous superparamagnetic nanostructures. These gels exhibit enhanced viscoelastic properties at very low concentrations of biotemplates unlike to those of gels obtained from respective pure biomolecules with fairly higher yield strain.
1D CuO nanochains and nanofibers synthesized in collaboration with Physics, displayed room temperature ferroelectric behavior with a large dielectric constant. The applications of the above nanosystems will also be discussed.