Salt-templated growth of monodisperse hollow nanostructures

Monodisperse hollow nanostructures have emerged as promising materials for applications in various areas. However, their widespread applications are often hindered by the low efficiency, high cost, and lack of eco-friendliness of existing preparation methods. Here we present a green, robust, efficient, cost-effective and scalable route to monodisperse hollow nanostructures with sodium citrate as the templates. A general precipitation method is developed to prepare uniform and intact salt nanostructures that serve as the green templates for hollow SiO2 nanostructures with controlled size, shape, thickness and porosity. This salt-templated strategy is also extended to the growth of hollow polydopamine nanostructures. We further demonstrate the one-pot synthesis of silica–silver composite nanostructures that exhibit superior performance in the catalytic hydrogenation of 4-nitrophenol.