Research Article Growth of CuS Nanostructures by Hydrothermal Route and Its Optical Properties Murugan Saranya, Chella Santhosh, Rajendran Ramachandran, and Andrews Nirmala Grace Centre for Nanotechnology Research, VIT University, Vellore, Tamil Nadu 632 014, India Correspondence should be addressed to Andrews Nirmala Grace; anirmalagladys@gmail.com Received 27 July 2013; Revised 28 October 2013; Accepted 9 December 2013; Published 30 January 2014 Academic Editor: Jefery L. Cofer Copyright © 2014 Murugan Saranya et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CuS nanostructures have been successfully synthesized by hydrothermal route using copper nitrate and sodium thiosulphate as copper and sulfur precursors. Investigations were done to probe the efect of cationic surfactant, namely, Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) on the morphology of the products. A further study has been done to know the efect of reaction time on the morphology of CuS nanostructures. Te FE-SEM results showed that the CuS products synthesized in CTAB were hexagonal plates and the samples prepared without CTAB were nanoplate like morphology of sizes about 40–80 nm. Presence of nanoplate- like structure of size about 40–80 nm was observed for the sample without CTAB. Te synthesized CuS nanostructures were characterized by X-ray difraction (XRD), FE-SEM, DRS-UV-Vis spectroscopy, and FT-IR spectroscopy. A possible growth mechanism has been elucidated for the growth of CuS nanostructures. 1. Introduction Semiconductor nanomaterials have attracted great interest because of their novel properties, like surface-to-volume ratio and the three-dimensional confnement of electrons, being diferent from those of their bulk counterparts [1–3]. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in transition metal chalcogenides due to their novel physical and chemical properties. Covellite copper sulfde, as a member of the chalcogenides, has been used in photo thermal conversion [4], electrodes [5], nonlinear optical materials, solar con- troller, solar radiation absorber [6], catalyst [7], nanometer- scale switches and high-capacity cathode material in lithium secondary batteries [8], and sensors [9]. It has been observed that sulfdes in nanoscale also function as photocatalyst with preferable catalytic ability [10]. Recently, various morpholo- gies of copper sulfde including nanowires [11], nanodisks [12], hollow spheres [13], and fower-like structures [14] were prepared by thermolysis [15], microemulsion [16], hydrother- mal [17, 18], solvothermal [19, 20], and polyol route [21], one-step solid-state reaction [22], chemical vapor deposi- tion (CVD) [23], wet chemical method [24], and template- assisted [25] and sonochemical methods [26] which have been reported. Among them, the hydrothermal method is the most common synthesis technology, because of its ease of operation with less-expensive equipment. Recently, many eforts have been devoted to the synthesis of CuS nanostruc- tures by solvothermal process at 140 ∘ C[27]. Many literatures are reported on the synthesis of CuS fakes by hydrother- mal and sonochemical methods [28, 29]. CuS hexagonal nanoplates have been obtained through a vacuum chemical vapor reaction process at about 450 ∘ C[30]. Hexagonal CuS nanoplatelets have been prepared through an improved solvothermal process at 120 ∘ C[31]. CuS nanodisks have been prepared by means of solution-phase-arrested precipitation of copper sulfde nanocrystals at 182 ∘ C. In our previous work, the growth of CuS nanostructures was prepared under hydrothermal conditions at 150 ∘ C without the use of any surfactant and the efect of reaction time is reported [17]. In this work, copper sulfde nanostructures with inter- esting morphologies were successfully synthesized in the presence of CTAB surfactant by a simple cost-efective hydrothermal technique using water as a solvent. Use of surfactant played an important role in determining the CuS morphology and renders the stability of the nanomaterials. Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Nanotechnology Volume 2014, Article ID 321571, 8 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/321571