A Generalized Crystallographic Description of All Tellurium Nanostructures

Abstract

Despite tellurium being less abundant in the Earth's crust than gold, platinum, or rare-earth elements, the number of industrial applications of tellurium has rapidly increased in recent years. However, to date, many properties of tellurium and its associated compounds remain unknown. For example, formation mechanisms of many tellurium nanostructures synthesized so far have not yet been verified, and it is unclear why tellurium can readily transform to other compounds like silver telluride by simply mixing with solutions containing silver ions. This uncertainty appears to be due to previous misunderstandings about the tellurium structure. Here, a new approach to the tellurium structure via synthesized structures is proposed. It is found that the proposed approach applies not only to these structures but to all other tellurium nanostructures. Moreover, some unique tellurium nanostructures whose formation mechanism are, until now, unconfirmed can be explained.

A generalized crystallographic description of all Te nanostructures is presented. Until now, there have been wrong approaches to a Te structure, and these make it impossible to elucidate why the tellurium nanostructures form tube-shaped morphologies and some unique features like a helical belt. The new crystallographic view at the atomic level can solve unconfirmed formation mechanisms.

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