Semiconductor-sensitized NiO photocathodes have been fabricated by successive ionic-layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) deposition of CdS, CdSe and cascaded CdS/CdSe onto mesoscopic NiO films. Detailed morphological and structural characterization reveals that the growth of CdS and CdSe on mesoscopic NiO electrodes results in the formation of crystalline and conformal layers under ambient con...

Microemulsions (MEs) are increasingly being used as nano-reactors for the formation and synthesis of nanoparticles or quantum dots (QDs). In this paper, we study the capacity of aqueous nanoreactors of AOT microemulsions for the formation of ultrasmall semiconductor QDs by fixing w = ([H2O]/[AOT]) and varying the concentration of CdS up to 100 mM. The CdS QDs in the MEs are evaluated using UV-v...

Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) nanorod array thin film with hydrogen treatment possesses the functions of transparent conducting oxide thin film and 1-D nanostructured semiconductor simultaneously. To enhance the absorption in the visible light region, it is sensitized by cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanoparticles which efficiently increase the absorption around 460 nm. The CdS nanoparticles-sensitiz...

The breakthrough of laser cooling in semiconductor has stimulated strong interest in further scaling up towards practical optical refrigeration. The challenge is the stoichiometric defect in bulk crystal which introduces mid-gap states that manifest as broad-band long-wavelength emission. In this project, we have developed optical floating zone method to grown millimeter-scale CdS bulk crystals...

We report on three-photon excited band edge and trap emission of CdS semiconductor nanocrystals. While the band edge emission intensity clearly shows a cubic dependence on excitation intensity, demonstrating three-photon absorption process, the trap emission does not exhibit such a cubic dependence. A simple theoretical model based on the assumption that there exist a limited number of trap sta...

We perform in this paper a kinetic study of the photoelectrochemical responses of nanoporous thin photoactive films. The films were fabricated by by a layer-by-layer assembly of positively charged polyelectrolytes (poly-l-Lysine, pLys) and negatively charged semiconductor nanoparticles (NPs) on a carboxylic acid terminated alkanethiol-modified gold electrode. Two types of NPs were used to build...

Recently, we reported the production of Cadmium sulfide (CdS) fluorescent semiconductor nanoparticles (quantum dots, QDs) by acidophilic bacteria of the Acidithiobacillus genus. Here, we report that the addition of inorganic phosphate to Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans ATCC 19703 cultures favors the biosynthesis of CdS QDs at acidic conditions (pH 3.5). The effect of pH, phosphate and cadmium con...

Nanowire solar cells are promising candidates for powering nanosystems and flexible electronics. The strain in the nanowires, introduced during growth, device fabrication and/or application, is an important issue for piezoelectric semiconductor (like CdS, ZnO, and CdTe) based photovoltaic. In this work, we demonstrate the first largely enhanced performance of n-CdS/p-Cu(2)S coaxial nanowire pho...

Tandem "Z-scheme" approaches to solar-to-chemical production afford the ability to independently develop and optimize reductive photocatalysts for CO2 reduction to multicarbon compounds and oxidative photocatalysts for O2 evolution. To connect the two redox processes, molecular redox shuttles, reminiscent of biological electron transfer, offer an additional level of facile chemical tunability t...