Comment on “Self-Purification in Semiconductor Nanocrystals”

Semiconductor Nanocrystals

Self-assembled metal–semiconductor compound nanocrystals on Group IV semiconductor surfaces

Nanocrystals of material B may form on a substrate of material A in order to relieve the strain from the B/A crystalline mismatch. In the most simplistic approximation, if such an elastic relaxation outweighs the additional surface energy due to the island walls, it will create the thermodynamic tendency for the nanocrystal formation. Hence one can ‘engineer’ ultra-small and crystallographicall...

Core/Shell semiconductor nanocrystals.

Colloidal core/shell nanocrystals contain at least two semiconductor materials in an onionlike structure. The possibility to tune the basic optical properties of the core nanocrystals, for example, their fluorescence wavelength, quantum yield, and lifetime, by growing an epitaxial-type shell of another semiconductor has fueled significant progress on the chemical synthesis of these systems. In ...

Semiconductor nanocrystals for biological imaging.

Conventional organic fluorophores suffer from poor photo stability, narrow absorption spectra and broad emission spectra. Semiconductor nanocrystals, however, are highly photo-stable with broad absorption spectra and narrow size-tunable emission spectra. Recent advances in the synthesis of these materials have resulted in the generation of bright, sensitive, extremely photo-stable and biocompat...

Excited-State Dynamics in Colloidal Semiconductor Nanocrystals

Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals have attracted continuous worldwide interest over the last three decades owing to their remarkable and unique size- and shape-, dependent properties. The colloidal nature of these nanomaterials allows one to take full advantage of nanoscale effects to tailor their optoelectronic and physical-chemical properties, yielding materials that combine size-, shape-,...