Facile synthesis of PbS nanorods induced by concentration difference

•The synthetic method is very simple, economical and environment benign.•Prepared PbS nanocrystals exhibit dendritic nature.•Band gap energy of PbS dendritic nanocrystals is 4.46 eV, higher than the bulk.•The optical absorption reveals the large blue-shift due to quantum confinement effect.•Resistivity analysis shows that the PbS dendrites exhibit semiconducting nature.

This report describes a simple method to synthesize PbS nanorods by aqueous chemical method under ambient conditions without the surface-capping molecules or structure-directing templates. X-ray diffraction studies revealed that the prepared sample is a polycrystalline powder crystallized in face centered cubic (fcc) PbS structure with the crystallites orientated preferentially along the (2 0 0) direction. The SEM analysis shows the formation of PbS nanorods of width 80 nm and length 410 nm. The compositional analysis confirms the presence of Pb and S. The optical absorption study of PbS nanostructures shows the blue-shift with respect to those of the bulk counterpart due to quantum confinement effect. Electrical measurement reveals that the prepared PbS nanorods exhibits the semiconducting nature.

Graphical abstractA simple approach has been proposed for the preparation of dendritic PbS nanocrystals which exhibit large blue-shift.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide