Shape-controlled preparation of Cu2O crystals and their growth mechanism

A facile solution-phase method is presented via reducing the copper-citrate complex solution with glucose to synthesis Cu2O crystals with different shapes from cubes, truncated octahedral, and finally to octahedral by adjusting the reaction conditions including Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone (PVP) concentration, reaction time, reaction temperature and so on. X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) have been applied to analyze the properties of the crystals with various architectures. The comparison shows that the growth mechanism is possibly based on the variation of the ratio (R) of the Cu2O crystal growth rates along the {1 0 0} and {1 1 1} direction.