Owing to their novel size-dependent properties, nanostructured materials have attracted growing interest in recent years. Meanwhile, ternary metal oxide composites have been another hot research field due to their unique properties compared with the simple metal oxides and the consequent applications such as in gas sensing, diluted magnetic semiconductors, etc. In the past, the synthesis of ternary metal oxide composites often relies on high temperature methods such as solid state reaction which tend to hinder the formation of nanostructured materials.

Recently, the research group led by Prof. Lian Gao of Shanghai Institute of Ceramics has developed a simple method for synthesizing Co-Sn-O nano rings. The Co-Sn-O nano rings are single crystals with the tetragonal SnO2 structure. They show strong ferromagnetism. The inter diffusion between the components is considered to be the main reason for the formation of such a nano ring structure. The formation mechanism introduced a new method and theoretic foundation for the synthesis of ternary metal oxide composites with the nano ring structure.

The related work has been published in Chemical Communications, 2007, 4372 (2006IF: 4.521). This work was financially supported by the National Basic Research Program and Shanghai Nanotechnology Promotion Center.