Synthesis and characterization of highly efficient CdSe/CdS core/shell nanocrystals with silar technique

Abstract

Owing to their size tunable electronic structure and optical properties, semiconductor nanocrystal quantum dots (NQDs) have become attractive for a wide range of device applications ranging from life sciences to electronics in the last two decades. However, highly efficient and stable NQDs are essential to reaching high performance with these devices utilizing NQDs. In this thesis, to meet these requirements, a new class of CdSe/CdS core/shell NQDs are studied including their colloidal synthesis and nanocharacterization. In this work, CdSe/CdS core/shell NQDs were synthesized with successive ion layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) technique, which enabled highly precise shell thickness control and uniform coating of the shell material. When compared to the most commonly used CdSe/ZnS core/shell NQDs, CdSe/CdS core/shell NQDs were found to provide important advantages. First, the lattice mismatch within CdSe and CdS (3.9%) is lower than that within CdSe and ZnS (12%), which was very critical for obtaining highly efficient NQDs. Second, as a result of having lower bandgap in CdS, great enhancement in absorption cross section was achieved with more red-shifted emission, which is not possible with CdSe/ZnS core/shell NQDs. Moreover, suppression of Auger recombination was successfully observed with the partial separation of electron and hole wavefunctions in the synthesized CdSe/CdS core/shell NQDs. With all these attractive properties that were experimentally measured, CdSe/CdS core/shell NQDs were found to make better alternatives to CdSe/ZnS core/shell for numerous applications.