A facile approach to fabrication of PbS hollow spheres with improved polystyrene templates

This paper provides a simple route to produce monodisperse PbS hollow spheres by using cationic polystyrene (PS) micro-particles as templates. The templates used in our experiment, were prepared via emulsifier-free polymerization by using the cationic monomer 2-(methacryloyloxy) ethyltrimethylammonium chloride as co-monomer. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTRI) were used to characterize the structure of the obtained PbS/PS composites and hollow PbS spheres. It was found that the as-produced samples are well-defined core-shell structures with an average diameter of about 0.98 μm. TEM showed that after the removal of the templates, the hollow structures were perfectly retained.