A facile and fast route to prepare antimony (Sb) nanostructures without additives

Herein, we report a safe, low cost and reproducible approach for the synthesis of antimony (Sb) nanostructures with most of them having prism like morphology and having well defined faces in the range of ~70-210 nm. The organics free approach is based on a reaction of antimony powder and pure water at ~210 °C without using any harmful additives and amines. The XRD pattern confirmed the composition and crystallinity of the grown nanostructures. The reported method besides being organics free is economical, fast and free of pollution, which will make it suitable for large scale production. Furthermore, it is well expected that such a technique could be extended to prepare many other important metal and metal oxide nanostructures. The prospects of the process are bright and promising.