Multipod Crystals of Perovskite SrTiO3

We use our designed self-propagating high-temperature synthesis (SHS) method for the synthesis of the multipod crystals of cubic perovskite strontium titanate (SrTiO3), which has a scale of about 5 μm in length and 200 nm in the cross section of legs. Electron microscopy and diffraction measurements show that the formation mechanism of these multipod crystals is not the same as previous reports of hexapod and tetrapod crystals but fairly similar to snow crystals, in which multi-needle-like crystals lie a on two-dimensional plate and two needle-like crystals grow perpendicular to them. These SrTiO3 multipod shaped crystals should provide promising materials for fundamental investigations on nanomicro-scale shape dependent unique properties such as piezoelectricity, opt-electricity, catalyticity, superconductivity, and so on. As the first success of synthesis of multipod-shaped perovskite crystals, our method shows a possibility that any materials would form the multipod shapes.