Simple and effective hydrothermal synthesis and magnetic properties of large-scale monodisperse fish-like CeO2 nanostructures

The large-scale beautiful monodisperse fish-like CeO2 nanostructures have been purposefully synthesized by controlling the morphology of corresponding CeCO3OH precursors via a facile hydrothermal method. XRD, SEM, XPS, Raman scattering and VSM were employed to characterize the samples. It was found that the calcined samples own a cubic fluorite structure of CeO2 with no crystalline impurity phase and there are Ce3+ ions and oxygen vacancies in its surface. The magnetic measurements show that the fish-like CeO2 nanostructures have excellent room temperature ferromagnetism although the Ce(OH)CO3 precursors exhibit paramagnetism, which can be reasonably explained for the effects of the novel morphology of samples, Ce3+ ions and oxygen vacancies.