Fabrication of metallic ions doped monodispersed porous In2O3 nanospheres

•A facile one-pot template-free route was used to prepare monodispersed doped In2O3 porous spheres.•The porous nanospheres are assembled by small nanocrystallites with the size of 15 nm.•XRD, XPS and Raman spectroscopy have confirmed that the metallic ions are indeed incorporated into the In2O3 lattice.•These results give us a guideline for the potential feasibility of doped metal oxides synthesis.

A series of metallic ions doped (M=Mn, La, Eu, Gd, Ge) In2O3 monodispersed porous nanospheres were prepared by calcining the as-prepared precursors obtained via a facile hydrothermal method in this paper. The morphology, structure, and composition of the as-synthesized doped porous nanospheres were analyzed in detail. The nanospheres with an average diameter of 150 nm are composed of numerous small nanocrystallites and possess good size uniformity. XRD, XPS and Raman spectroscopy were used to identify the products structures and the peak shifts in these spectroscopies confirmed that the impurity element was doped in cubic In2O3. A detailed mechanism has been proposed based on time-dependent experimental results.