One-Pot Synthesis Enables Magnetic Coupled Cr2Te3/MnTe/Cr2Te3 Integrated Heterojunction Nanorods

Magnetic heterostructures offer great promise in spintronic devices due to their unique magnetic properties, such as exchange bias effect, topological superconductivity, and magneto-resistance. Although various magnetic heterostructures including core/shell, multilayer, and van der Waals systems have been fabricated recently, the construction of perfect heterointerfaces usually rely on complicated and high-cost fabrication methods such as molecular-beam epitaxy; surprisingly, few one-dimensional (1D) bimagnetic heterojunctions, which provide multidegrees of freedom to modulate magnetic properties via magnetic anisotropy and interface coupling, have been fabricated to date. Here we report a one-pot solution-based method for the synthesis of ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic heterojunction nanorods with excellent heterointerfaces in the case of Cr₂Te₃/MnTe/Cr₂Te₃. The precise control of homogeneous nucleation of MnTe and heterogeneous nucleation of Cr₂Te₃ is a key factor in synthesizing this heterostructure. The resulting 1D bimagnetic heterojunction nanorods exhibit high coercivity of 5.8 kOe and exchange bias of 892.5 Oe achieved by the magnetic MnTe/Cr₂Te₃ interface coupling.

One-Dimensional Cu2- xSe Nanorods as the Cathode Material for High-Performance Aluminum-Ion Battery

In this work, nonstoichiometric Cu_{2- x}Se fabricated by a facile water evaporation process is used as high-performance Al-ion battery cathode materials. Cu_{2- x}Se electrodes show high reversible capacity and excellent cycling stability, even at a high current density of 200 mA g^-1, the specific charge capacity in the initial cycle is 241 mA h g^-1 and maintains 100 mA h g^-1 after 100 cycles with a Coulombic efficiency of 96.1%, showing good capacity retention. The prominent kinetics of Cu_{2- x}Se electrodes is also revealed by the GITT, which is attributed to the ultrahigh electronic conductivity of the Cu_{2- x}Se material. Most importantly, an extensive research is dedicated to investigating the detailed intercalation and de-intercalation of relatively large chloroaluminate anions into the cubic Cu_{2- x}Se, which is conducive to better understand the reaction mechanism of the Al/Cu_{2- x}Se battery.