Synthesis of new octa-nuclear cubic cage of Cu-Mo as a precursor for the synthesis of CuMoO4 nanoparticles

Within the last two decades, the communicative design and synthesis of inorganic–organic composite materials based on polyoxometalate (POM) building blocks have been attracting great interest, not only in terms of structural versatility but also because of promising applications in the area of adsorption [1], catalysis [2], gas-sorption [3], and magnetism [4,5]. A new coordination polymer of polyoxomolybdate,{[Cu4(phen)8Mo4O18]·(H2O)4} (1) (phen = 1,10-phenanthrolin), has been synthesized under solvothermal reaction, This compound was characterized by elemental analysis, single-crystal X-ray diffraction, IR spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry and thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). Single-crystal X-ray analysis reveals that the structure contains a neutral bimetallic {Cu4Mo4} cluster as the secondary building unit. The thermal stability of compound 1 has been studied by TGA. CuMoO4 nano-structures also were simply synthesized by direct calcination of the single crystals and nano-sized compound 1 at 400 and 600 0C. The semiconducting properties of these solid-state compounds was revealed from the measurements of the diffuse reflectance UV-vis spectra, in which the band gap values at ca. 2.8 eV are similar to inorganic semiconductor materials, suggesting potential applications in areas of photocatalysis and light-to-electricity conversion