What is an oxide of a transition element?

Answer 1

Transition metal oxides (TMOs) exhibit a rich collection of interesting and intriguing properties, which can be tailored for a wide variety of applications including low-loss power delivery, quantum computing using cooper pairs, ultra high-density magnetic data storage and more recently spintronic applications. Many transition metal oxides have been prepared in bulk form or as thin films, which paved the way for intensive research studies in the past several decades. We expect nanostructures, in particular, nanowires made of transition metal oxides may offer enormous opportunities to explore intriguing physics and also practical applications. However, obtaining single crystalline and high quality TMO nanowires has been a long-standing issue to the investigators in this field. The difficulty is largely related to the complex composition of TMOs, and most synthetic techniques developed in the past for semiconductive nanowires can not be simply applied due to issues like phase separation and the lack of suitable catalysts.