Crystalline Tellurium Nanowires Enabled by Rapid Hydrolysis of Lithium-Intercalated Layered Metal Tellurides.

Tellurium (Te) nanowires attracted significant attention due to their unique magneto-electric effect, thermoelectric properties and strong piezoelectricity. However, their controlled synthesis using traditional methods, including microwave irradiation, thermal evaporation and hydrothermal synthesis, suffers from serious trade-offs between prolonged processing and limited crystal quality, preventing their widespread applications. Herein, we demonstrate an ultrafast, surfactant-free strategy that enables scalable synthesis of solution-processable crystalline Te nanowires within seconds. In this method, lithium-intercalated MoTe2 (denoted as LixMoTe2), obtained from the initial synthetic step, undergoes a rapid hydrolysis reaction that completes on a sub-second timescale at room temperature. Subsequently, the structural expansion induced by in-situ H2 formation breaks Mo─Te bonds, facilitating the uniform and rapid growth of Te nanowires with an average length of ∼824 nm and width of ∼21 nm. These solution-processed crystalline Te nanowires exhibit a hole mobility of 8.7 cm2 V-1 s-1 at room temperature and deliver fast photoresponse across the visible light regime (405-638 nm). They display remarkable weak-light detection capability, as evidenced by a high specific detectivity of 1×108 Jones. This rapid synthetic approach paves the way for further applications of crystalline Te nanowires in electronic devices, energy conversion and optoelectronic devices.