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Nucleation of quartz under ambient conditions

Buckley, Phil; Hargreaves, Natasha; Cooper, Sharon

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Authors

Phil Buckley

Natasha Hargreaves



Abstract

Quartz nucleation normally requires harsh conditions; for instance, hydrothermal processes at 200–300 °C and 15–100 bar, where the high growth rate precludes selective formation of nanometer-sized quartz. Under ambient conditions, even quartz growth is considered to occur exceedingly slowly, requiring yearly timescales. Here we show that nanoquartz of size 1–5 nm can be nucleated from microemulsions under ambient conditions within 2 days. The nanoquartz particles are grown and annealed under mild hydrothermal conditions of 175 °C and autogenic pressure. This enables nanoquartz of size <10 nm and controllable structure to be obtained exclusively. Surface defects play a key role in determining the catalytic properties of the nanoquartz. Consequently, a similar two-stage microemulsion-hydrothermal synthesis strategy could provide significant benefits in optimizing nanocrystal catalysts.

Citation

Buckley, P., Hargreaves, N., & Cooper, S. (2018). Nucleation of quartz under ambient conditions. Communications Chemistry, 1, Article 49. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-018-0049-4

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 3, 2018
Online Publication Date Aug 24, 2018
Publication Date Aug 24, 2018
Deposit Date Jun 28, 2018
Publicly Available Date Aug 24, 2018
Journal Communications chemistry.
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 1
Article Number 49
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-018-0049-4

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





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