Acidity of Carboxylic Acid Ligands Influences the Formation of VO(A) and VO(B) Nanocrystals under Solvothermal Conditions.

Vanadium dioxide (VO) can adopt many different crystal structures at ambient temperature and pressure, each with different, and often desirable, electronic, optical, and chemical properties. Understanding how to control which crystal phase forms under various reaction conditions is therefore crucial to developing VO for various applications. This paper describes the impact of ligand acidity on the formation of VO nanocrystals from the solvothermal reaction of vanadyl acetylacetonate (VO(acac)) with stoichiometric amounts of water.