title: Gas-generated thermal oxidation of a coordination cluster for an anion-doped mesoporous metal oxide.
abstract: Central in material design of metal oxides is the increase of surface area and control of intrinsic electronic and optical properties, because of potential applications for energy storage, photocatalysis and photovoltaics. Here, we disclose a facile method, inspired by geochemical process, which gives rise to mesoporous anion-doped metal oxides. As a model system, we demonstrate that simple calcination of a multinuclear coordination cluster results in synchronic chemical reactions: thermal oxidation of Ti8O10(4-aminobenzoate)12 and generation of gases including amino-group fragments. The gas generation during the thermal oxidation of Ti8O10(4-aminobenzoate)12 creates mesoporosity in TiO2. Concurrently, nitrogen atoms contained in the gases are doped into TiO2, thus leading to the formation of mesoporous N-doped TiO2. The mesoporous N-doped TiO2 can be easily synthesized by calcination of the multinuclear coordination cluster, but shows better photocatalytic activity than the one prepared by a conventional sol-gel method. Owing to an intrinsic designability of coordination compounds, this facile synthetic will be applicable to a wide range of metal oxides and anion dopants.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University, Kita 10 Nishi 8, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0810, Japan.
authors.forename: Kenji
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hirai
authors.affiliation: Creative Research Institution, Hokkaido University, Kita 21, Nishi 10, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 001-0021, Japan.|Graduate School of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Kita 13, Nishi 8, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-8628, Japan.
authors.forename: Shigehito
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Isobe
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University, Kita 10 Nishi 8, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Hokkaido 060-0810, Japan.
authors.forename: Kazuki
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sada