Controlled isotropic or anisotropic nanoscale growth of coordination polymers: Formation of hybrid coordination polymer particles

The ability to fabricate multicompositional hybrid materials in a precise and controlled manner is one of the primary goals of modern materials science research. In addition, an understanding of the phenomena associated with the systematic growth of one material on another can facilitate the evolution of multifunctional hybrid materials. Here, we demonstrate precise manipulation of the isotropic and/or anisotropic nanoscale growth of various coordination polymers (CPs) to obtain heterocompositional hybrid coordination polymer particles. Chemical composition analyses conducted at every growth step reveal the formation of accurately assembled hybrid nanoscale CPs, and microscopy images are used to examine the morphology of the particles and visualize the hybrid structures. The dissimilar growth behavior, that is, growth in an isotropic or anisotropic fashion, is found to be dependent on the size of the metal ions involved within the CPs.