Room-Temperature Growth of Morphoplastic Scandium Nanowires through Coordination-Induced Self-Assembly for White-Light-Driven Photocatalytic Degradation of Rhodamine

Photoactive nanowires play an important role on the photoelectric-related applications; however, the in situ large-scale growth of photoactive nanowires on the arbitrary substrate still faces a great challenge. Herein, for the first time, we develop a facile coordination-induced self-assembly strategy for preparing the nanowires with high photoactivity through keeping a high concentration of Sc(NO3)3 and tartaric acid (TA) aqueous solution at room temperature. Surprisingly, the nanowires can grow directionally along the direction of water flow on any substrate due to the growth mechanism driven by water molecules, showing that the proposed nanowires are morphoplastic depending on the direction of liquid flow. The formation of nanowires has been proved to be attributed to the synergistic effect of water molecule-involved hydrogen bonding between hydroxyl groups of TA ligands as well as the multi-coordination of Sc3+ ions. Meanwhile, the prepared nanowires are highly photoactive, showing a strong photooxidation ability toward rhodamine 6G dyes, with a degradation efficiency of about 95.8% within 40 min. This finding introduces a coordination growth mechanism of nanowires, which not only provides a great possibility for large-scale and low-cost synthesis of photoactive nanowires with morphoplastic features but also shows a good application prospect in water cleaning by the photocatalysis technique.