Colloidal synthesis of NaYF4 nano- and microparticles by sacrificial template method

Abstract

Lanthanide-doped sodium yttrium tetrafluoride nanoparticles show intense upconversion emissions which raise great attention in a variety of luminescence applications. This host lattice shows specially attractive properties in its hexagonal phase, which normally requires high temperature reactions and complex procedures to be synthesized. In this work, we synthesized nano- and micro-sized NaYF4 particles with controllable cubic or hexagonal structure via sacrificial colloidal template method under mild conditions of 50 ºC/1 atm in a 3 h-long reaction.