Facile hydrothermal synthesis and optical properties of flower-like CeO sub(2) composed of numerous porous nanorods

Flower-like CeO sub(2) hierarchical structures have been successfully synthesized by a facile template-free hydrothermal method using ethanol/water mixtures as solvent. X-ray diffraction shown that the synthesized flower-like CeO sub(2) nanostructures exhibited a fluorite cubic structure. It was found that the flower-like CeO sub(2) hierarchical structures with a diameter of 2-5 mu m are composed of numerous porous nanorods as the petals with an average diameter of about 15 nm, which connect at one end and diverge at the other end to form an open hierarchical architecture. The synthesized CeO sub(2) samples show excellent room temperature optical properties, which is likely associated with Ce super(3+) ions and oxygen vacancies in the samples as supported by the XPS and Raman scattering data.