Shape-controlled preparation of Cu₂O crystals and their growth mechanism

Highlights: • A facile and harmless method to synthesise Cu₂O crystals is built. • Different morphologies Cu₂O crystals are obtained by adjusting the reaction condition. • The growth mechanism and influences of reaction conditions have been discussed. - Abstract: A facile solution-phase method is presented via reducing the copper-citrate complex solution with glucose to synthesis Cu₂O crystals with different shapes from cubes, truncated octahedral, and finally to octahedral by adjusting the reaction conditions including Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone (PVP) concentration, reaction time, reaction temperature and so on. X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) have been applied to analyze the properties of the crystals with various architectures. The comparison shows that the growth mechanism is possibly based on the variation of the ratio (R) of the Cu₂O crystal growth rates along the {1 0 0} and {1 1 1} direction