As a significant metal chalcogenide, copper sulfide (CuS, 0 < x < 1), with a unique semiconducting and nontoxic nature, has received significant attention over the past few decades. Extensive investigations have been employed to the various CuS micro-/nanostructures owing to their excellent optoelectronic behavior, potential thermoelectric properties, and promising biomedical applications. As a result, micro-/nanostructured CuS with well-controlled morphologies, sizes, crystalline phases, and compositions have been rationally synthesized and applied in the fields of photocatalysis, energy conversion, in vitro biosensing, and in vivo imaging and therapy. However, a comprehensive review on diversified CuS micro-/nanostructures is still lacking; therefore, there is an imperative need to thoroughly highlight the new advances made in function-directed CuS-based nanocomposites. In this review, we have summarized the important progress made in the diversified CuS micro-/nanostructures, including that in the synthetic strategies for the preparation of 0D, 1D, 2D, and 3D micro-/nanostructures (including polyhedral, hierarchical, hollow architectures, and superlattices) and in the development of modified CuS-based composites for enhanced performance, as well as their various applications. Furthermore, the present issues and promising research directions are briefly discussed.

Novel highly symmetric multi-faceted polyhedral Cu 2 O crystals enclosed by controllable high-index facets and different low-index facets have been synthesized via a template-free complex-precursor solution route. The formation and evolution of these polyhedral shapes can be attributed to the aggregation and ripening mechanism with face-selective adsorption. The appearance of these novel polyhedral architectures further enriches the current morphologies of Cu 2 O crystals, and might become useful for the fundamental study of crystals design.

Hybrid Cu2O-based heterogeneous nanostructures possess novel synergistic properties that arise from the integrated interaction between the disparate components, thereby showing promising potential for various important applications including solar cells, carbon monoxide oxidation, photocatalysts, field emission, sensors, templates and so on. With the rapid progress in nanomaterials science and nanotechnology, hybrid Cu2O-based heterogeneous nanostructures with well-controlled compositions, shapes and sizes have been rationally designed and synthesized. This review attempts to summarize the important advances in the development of different types of hybrid Cu2O-based heterogeneous nanostructures, such as hybrid Cu2O-metal nanostructures, hybrid Cu2O-metal oxide nanostructures and hybrid Cu2O-carbon nanostructures. The correlations between the improved performances and interfacial structures of the hybrid Cu2O-based heterogeneous nanostructures are discussed based on some important and representative examples. Several key scientific issues and perspective research directions in this field are also given.

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