Facile synthesis of single-crystal NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets via a pressureless sintered process

•NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets were synthesized by a facile pressureless sintered process.•NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets possess a well-defined rectangular morphology.•NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets had diameters around 50 nm.•A possible growth mechanism of NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets was proposed.

In this paper, we further report a facile and versatile pressureless sintered process route for synthesis of single-crystal NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets using selenium and niobium powders as raw materials. The morphology and crystal structure of as-prepared NbSe2 samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). XRD results indicated that as-prepared samples can be indexed to the hexagonal phase of NbSe2 without any impurity. SEM and TEM images revealed that NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets had uniform sizes with mean diameters of about 50–100 nm. On the basis of observations of a time-dependent morphology evolution process, a possible growth mechanism of NbSe2 ultrathin nanosheets was preliminarily proposed.

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