Synthesis of noble metal chalcogenides via cation exchange reactions

Noble metal chalcogenides (NMCs) are an important class of materials with unique properties and widespread applications; however, the synthesis of these materials in a well-controlled manner remains challenging. Cation exchange (CE) transformation is a versatile, topotactic strategy which enables the synthesis of a range of materials, but its use for preparing NMCs has not been studied in detail, impeding the application of these materials. Here we demonstrate a robust and general strategy for the fabrication of a wide variety of NMCs via CE transformations, in which CuTe metal chalcogenides are used as sacrificial templates for CE with noble metal cations. The generality of the CE strategy is validated by the fabrication of NMCs with tailored morphologies (zero-dimension (0D), 1D, 2D and 3D), compositions (Pd/Pt/Rh/Ru/Ag/Au-based NMCs) and phases. In-depth mechanistic study shows that the well-controlled synthesis of NMCs is realized by kinetic control and solvent-dependent thermodynamic control.