Tubular Nanostructures of Cr2Te4O11 and Mn2TeO6 through Room-Temperature Chemical Transformations of Tellurium Nanowires

Hollow nanostructures have attracted a great deal of attention because of the unique physical and chemical properties they exhibit. The high surface areas and low material density make them ideal candidates for potential applications such as highefficiency catalysts or drug-delivery agents. Hollow 1D nanostructures with tubular morphology have attracted growing interest. Tubular nanostructures made of semiconductors, metals, ferroelectrics, and magnetic materials have all been studied extensively. Various strategies such as rolling up of layered materials or via an axial growth in a rolled-up form, etching the core of a core shell nanowire, and creating pores in templates have been employed to synthesize tubular structures. Metal oxide nanostructures, especially ternary metal oxide nanostructures, are of deep scientific interest because of their structure-dependent optical, electronic, mechanical, and catalytic properties. 16 They have a broad range of technological applications such as transistors and computing devices. Direct large scale synthesis of these materials, in an environmental friendlymanner, with control over nanoparticle structure, surface chemistry, monodispersity, crystal structure, and assembly has been a long-standing problem. Compared with anisotropic structures made of other materials, ternary oxide structures are very few, and because of the dearth of material availability, the mechanical, transport, photoconductive, thermoelectric, electronic, optical, and catalytic properties of such materials are mostly studied theoretically. Hence, there is an interest to devise synthetic strategies to generate technologically relevant anisotropic ternary oxide structures. An alternate for the direct synthesis is to devise strategies to manipulate postsynthetically already formed structures by chemical treatments to fine-tune size, shape, or composition. Postsynthetic manipulation of nanostructures, 20 especially the anisotropic ones, has attracted growing interest because it allows compositional modifications or even yields novel structures with multiple components. Such variations may not be possible through direct synthetic processes. Through precise control over reaction conditions, unconventional shapes with versatile crystal structures can be created because of the high mechanical stress generated during some transformations. Te nanowires (Te NWs) are versatile nanosystems, having a large number of application possibilities. The reduction potential of the TeO3 2 /Te system (0.589 V) allows the possibility of galvanictype reactions also. Reactions of TeNWs resulting in the formation of metallic composites are well-documented. Utilizing the reduction ability of Te NWs, novel leaf-like graphenic structures have been created. Te NWs have been used as sacrificial templates for the synthesis of various 1D nanostructures of Pt