As important functional materials, the post transition metal dichalcogenides (FeS2, CoS2, NiS2, and NiSe2) have drawn special interest because of their unique electronic, magnetic, and photovoltaic properties and potential applications in various technological fields. Among those important inorganic materials, pyrite (FeS2) is an interesting material owning to its potential applications in a variety of state-of-the-art devices.To date, various routes for the synthesis of micro- and nanostructures of transition metal dichalcogenide materials have been reported. However, compared with the studies on other metal chalcogenides, efforts towards the synthesis and characterization of FeS2 have lagged far behind.

Researchers at the R&D Center of Lubricating and Protecting Materials recently have developed a new and facile one-step hydrothermal route for the fabrication of well-defined FeS2 crystallites with different shapes for the first time.

The approach does not require expensive single-source precursors or harmful solvents and the products are pure. Moreover, the results of many experiments show that this method has good reproducibility. This strategy could enrich the related FeS2 chemistry and shed new light on the synthetic method in the preparation of other metal dichalcogenide crystals.

Importantly, this work not only provides an elegant shape-controlled structure that has not been accessed by other methods but also opens a new way for the shape-controlled synthesis of FeS2 crystallites. Furthermore, the shape evolution mechanism has been tentatively proposed based on the experimental results and the optical properties have also been preliminarily studied.

This work has received support from the National 973 project of China and Innovative Group Foundation from NSFC, and the important direction project for the knowledge innovative engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The detailed report was published in CrystEngComm (CrystEngComm, 2010, 12, 3797–3805).

CrystEngComm paper.