Low-cost synthesis of hollow Cu2O octahedra with more than one shell

Inorganic materials with hollow and multilayer structures have attracted many interests because of their special applications. In this paper we reported a low-cost synthetic route for hollow cuprous oxide octahedra with more than one shell. Various characterizations identified the as-obtained powder as pure, uniform, and monodispersed Cu2O octahedra wrapped by the {111} faces. To determine the formation mechanism, the time-dependent experiments were conducted and the results showed that the intermediate phase, CuO, precipitated out first and its reduction by amino acids led to the formation of hollow Cu2O structures.