Synthesis and Characterization of Doped Group-IV Semiconductor Nanocrystals

摘要

Doped semiconductor nanocrystals show great promise for several applications in microelectronics and integrated optoelectronics. Nanocrystal based technology has the potential to revolutionize several fields of technology such as thin conducting films, light emitting devices, tunable lasers, transistors, and photovoltaics, and to provide less harmful alternatives to toxic fluorescent dyes for application in bio-imaging, to name a few. While properties of nanocrystals are clearly dependent on their size, considerable research is underway to explore the influence of dopants on the properties of semiconductor nanocrystals. The nanoscale dimensions make elusive the introduction of dopants into these confined structures. Also, there is the possibility of making them degenerate even with the addition of very small quantities of the dopant. Here, we present a facile, low-cost procedure that we have developed for the synthesis of non-degenerate doped semiconductor nanocrystals and study their properties.