Recently, Prof. Wenzhong Wang and co-workers from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics Chinese Academy of Sciences have made a great progress in the synthesis of multi-shelled hollow Cu₂O spheres by using multilamellar vesicles as templates. Although this route is theoretically possible, it has never been realized before. They successfully synthesized unilammellar and mutlilamellar vesicles and utilized them as soft templates to prepare the Cu₂O hollow structures (see the above figures). Based on the different structures of the vesicles, they obtained single-shelled (Fig. a), double-shelled (Fig. b), triple-shelled (Fig. c), and even quadruple-shelled (Fig. d) hollow spheres. Previously, vesicle-templated route could just be used to prepare single-shelled hollow spheres. Their route presents an important development on the vesicle-templated synthesis. Moreover, these novel multi-shelled hollow spheres will be of interest to wide researchers and may bring new properties and applications including catalysis and carriers.

 

The results have been published in “Angewandte Chemie International Edition” (2007, 46, 1489-1492). The referees highly valued their work: “The multi-layered spheres are novel and the electron evidence showing the multi-layers is convincing. The materials described in the manuscript are new, should be of interest to a wide audience and have potential application…”; “The authors report several very interesting shell morphologies in this manuscript. The synthesis route is indeed simple and able to give homogeneous products for multi-shelled Cu₂O…”