Facile Solution-based Synthesis and Optical Properties of Co3O4 Nanoparticles at Low-temperature

Cobalt oxide（C0304） with different morphologies was achieved by a simple solution-based method. Various parallel experiments show that several experimental parameters, such as the concentrations of NaOH and ethylene glyeol（EG）, play important roles in the morphological controlling of C0304 nanoparticles. A lower concen- tration of NaOH favors quasi-spherical product with a uniform size of about 15 nm, whereas a higher concentration of NaOH generally leads to the formation of nanoplates with wide size distribution. In addition, C0304 nanorods were also obtained partially by introducing a certain amount of EG. A possible mechanism was proposed for the selective formation of C0304 with various morphologies. X-Ray diffraction（XRD）, infrared（IR） spectrometry, scanning elec- tron microscopy（SEM）, transmission electron microscopy（TEM） and UV-Vis spectrometry were used to characterize the samples.