Fabrication and formation mechanism of Li2MnO3 ultrathin porous nanobelts by electrospinning

Li2MnO3 ultrathin porous nanobelts with excellent continuities have been fabricated by the electrospinning method. Both scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observations showed that Li2MnO3 was well-defined one-dimensional nanobelts. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) results exhibited that the regular belt-like nanostructures possessed high degree of crystallinity without any detectable impurity phases, while their nanoparticle counterparts prepared by a typical sol-gel route were beset by several foreign impurities. Moreover, such nanobelts also demonstrated larger surface areas compared with the nanoparticles. A temperature-dependent experiment has been adopted in an attempt to trail the growth process of the nanobelts, and then a possible formation mechanism was proposed. Finally, other lithium manganese oxides e.g. LiMn2O4 and Li4Mn5O12 nanobelts were also synthesized via simply changing the rations of Li to Mn, indicating a versatile method was introduced in this work to obtain regular nanobelts.