A General Strategy for Colloidal Stable Ultrasmall Amorphous Mineral Clusters in Organic Solvents

While nature exerts precise control over the size and chemical composition of minerals, this is still a challenging task for artificial syntheses. Despite its significance, until now, there are still no reports on colloidal mineral nanoparticles in the subnanometer range. Here we developed a general gas diffusion strategy using 10,12-pentacosadiynoic acid as a ligand and ethanol as a solvent to fabricate stable amorphous mineral clusters with a core size of less than 2 nm. First discovered for CaCO, the method was successfully extended to produce monolayer protected clusters of MgCO, SrCO, Eu(CO), Tb(CO), Ce(CO), Ca (PO) , CaCO and their hybrid minerals, Ca Mg (CO) and Ca (CO) (PO) . All the mineral clusters can be well dispersed in organic solvents like toluene, and are stable for a long period without further crystallization. Our work paves a way for the artificial synthesis of colloidal mineral clusters, which may have various uses in both fundamental research and industry.