American Chemical Society, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 12(137), p. 4260-4266, 2015
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5b01747
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The direct production of branched semiconductor arrays with highly ordered orientation has proven to be a considerable challenge over the last two decades. Here we report a mesoporous interfacial atomic rearrangement (MIAR) method to di-rectly produce highly-crystalline, finger-like branched iron oxide nanoarrays from the mesoporous nanopyramids. This method has excellent versatility and flexibility for heteroatom-doping of metallic elements, including Sn, Bi, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, and W, in which the mesoporous nanopyramids first absorb guest doping molecules into the mesoporous channels, and then convert the mesoporous pyramids into branching artificial nanofingers. The crystalline structure can provide more optoelectronic active sites of the nanofingers by interfacial atomic rearrangements of doping molecules and mesopore channels at the porous solid-solid interface. As a proof-of-concept, the Sn-doped Fe2O3 artificial nanofingers (ANFs) exhibit a high photocurrent density of ~ 1.26 mA/cm2, ~ 5.25 folds of the pristine mesoporous Fe2O3 nanopyramid arrays. Furthermore, with surface chemical functionalization, the Sn-doped ANF biointerfaces allow nanomolar level recognition of metabolism-related biomolecules (~ 5 nm for glutathione). This MIAR method suggests a new growth means of branched mesostructures, with enhanced optoelectronic applications.