Green and scalable synthesis of nanocrystalline kuramite

• Andrea Giaccherini,
• Giuseppe Cucinotta,
• Stefano Martinuzzi,
• Enrico Berretti,
• Werner Oberhauser,
• Alessandro Lavacchi,
• Giovanni Orazio Lepore,
• Giordano Montegrossi,
• Maurizio Romanelli,
• Antonio De Luca,
• Massimo Innocenti,
• Vanni Moggi Cecchi,
• Matteo Mannini,
• Antonella Buccianti and
• Francesco Di Benedetto

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2019, 10, 2073–2083, doi:10.3762/bjnano.10.202

• production costs). Due to the scarcity of the resources involved in the process and the need for the reduction of potential pollution, a greener approach to solar cell material production is required. Among others, the solvothermal approach for the synthesis of nanocrystalline Cu–Sn–S (CTS) materials fulfils

• isomorphic phases related to kuramite. Indeed, the Cu–Sn–S pseudo ternary compositional field presents several closely related phases: mohite (monoclinic Cu2SnS3) with its tetragonal and cubic polymorphs [36][37], kuramite (Cu3SnS4) [38][39][40], Wang’s phase (Cu4SnS4) [41][42], and Cu4Sn7S16 [43], among

• others. Natural ternary Cu–Sn–S phases populate the pseudo ternary compositional field mostly along the two CuS–SnS and Cu2S–SnS2 joints [36][44]. Their nanocrystalline counterparts have broadened X-ray diffraction peaks. This limits the discrimination of the different phases and the study of their

Raman study of flash-lamp annealed aqueous Cu₂ZnSnS₄ nanocrystals

• Yevhenii Havryliuk,
• Oleksandr Selyshchev,
• Mykhailo Valakh,
• Alexandra Raevskaya,
• Oleksandr Stroyuk,
• Constance Schmidt,
• Volodymyr Dzhagan and
• Dietrich R. T. Zahn

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2019, 10, 222–227, doi:10.3762/bjnano.10.20

• sulfide Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS); CuS; Cu-Sn-S; kesterite; phonon; pulsed light crystallization; Raman spectroscopy; secondary phase; SnS; Introduction Affordable and non-toxic solar energy materials having a high absorption coefficient and a bandgap in the solar illumination range are an ever-growing research