Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2011
Recently, inorganic/inorganic and organic/inorganic heterostructured materials have attracted considerable research interest, due to their unusual physicochemical properties, which cannot be achieved by conventional solid-state reactions. In order to develop new hybrid materials, various synthetic approaches, such as vacuum deposition, Langmuir–Blodgett films, selfassembly, and intercalation techniques, have been explored. Among them, the intercalation reaction technique—that is, the reversible insertion of guest species into the two-dimensional host lattice—is expected to be one of the most effective tools for preparing new layered heterostructures because this process can provide a soft chemical way of hybridizing inorganic/inorganic, organic/inorganic, or biological/inorganic compounds. In fact, the intercalation/deintercalation process allows us to design high-performance materials in a solution at ambient temperature and pressure, just as “soft solution processing” provides a simple and economical route for advanced inorganic materials by means of an environmentally benign, lowenergy method. These unique advantages of the intercalation technique have led to its wide application to diverse fields of the solid-state sciences, namely, secondary (rechargeable) batteries, electrochromic systems, oxidation–reduction catalysts, separating agents, sorbents, and so on. Through these extensive studies, many kinds of low-dimensional compounds have been developed as host materials for the intercalation reaction, including graphite, transition-metal chalcogenides, transitionmetal oxides, aluminosilicates, metal phosphates, metal chalcogenohalides, and so on. Recently, the area of intercalation chemistry has been extended to high-Tc superconducting copper oxides, resulting in remarkable structural anisotropy.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.