Doping of bulk semiconductors has revealed widespread success in optoelectronic applications. In the past few decades, substantial effort has been engaged for doping at the nanoscale. Recently, doped colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) have been demonstrated to be promising materials for luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) as they can be engineered for providing highly tunable and Stokes-shifted emission in the solar spectrum. However, existing doped CQDs that are aimed for full solar spectrum LSCs suffer from moderately low quantum efficiency, intrinsically small absorption cross-section, and gradually increasing absorption profiles coinciding with the emission spectrum, which together fundamentally limit their effective usage. Here, the authors show the first account of copper doping into atomically flat colloidal quantum wells (CQWs). In addition to Stokes-shifted and tunable dopant-induced photoluminescence emission, the copper doping into CQWs enables near-unity quantum efficiencies (up to ≈97%), accompanied by substantially high absorption cross-section and inherently step-like absorption profile, compared to those of the doped CQDs. Based on these exceptional properties, the authors have demonstrated by both experimental analysis and numerical modeling that these newly synthesized doped CQWs are excellent candidates for LSCs. These findings may open new directions for deployment of doped CQWs in LSCs for advanced solar light harvesting technologies.
As an attractive materials system for highperformance optoelectronics, colloidal nanoplatelets (NPLs) benefit from atomic-level precision in thickness, minimizing emission inhomogeneous broadening. Much progress has been made to enhance their photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) and photostability. However, to date, layer-by-layer growth of shells at room temperature has resulted in defects that limit PLQY and thus curtail the performance of NPLs as an optical gain medium. Here, we introduce a hot-injection method growing giant alloyed shells using an approach that reduces core/shell lattice mismatch and suppresses Auger recombination. Near-unity PLQY is achieved with a narrow full-width-at-half-maximum (20 nm), accompanied by emission tunability (from 610 to 650 nm). The biexciton lifetime exceeds 1 ns, an order of magnitude longer than in conventional colloidal quantum dots (CQDs). Reduced Auger recombination enables record-low amplified spontaneous emission threshold of 2.4 μJ cm −2 under one-photon pumping. This is lower by a factor of 2.5 than the best previously reported value in nanocrystals (6 μJ cm −2 for CdSe/CdS NPLs). Here, we also report single-mode lasing operation with a 0.55 mJ cm −2 threshold under twophotoexcitation, which is also the best among nanocrystals (compared to 0.76 mJ cm −2 from CdSe/CdS CQDs in the Fabry−Peŕot cavity). These findings indicate that hot-injection growth of thick alloyed shells makes ultrahigh performance NPLs.
Here, the CdSe/CdS@CdS core/crown@shell heterostructured nanoplatelets (NPLs) resembling a platelet-in-box structure are developed and successfully synthesized. It is found that the core/crown@shell NPLs exhibit consistently substantially improved photoluminescence quantum yield compared to the core@shell NPLs regardless of their CdSe-core size, CdS-crown size, and CdS-shell thickness. This enhancement in quantum yield is attributed to the passivation of trap sites resulting from the critical peripheral growth with laterally extending CdS-crown layer before the vertical shell growth. This is also verifi ed with the disappearance of the fast nonradiative decay component in the core/crown NPLs from the time-resolved fl uorescence spectroscopy. When compared to the core@shell NPLs, the core/crown@shell NPLs exhibit relatively symmetric emission behavior, accompanied with suppressed lifetime broadening at cryogenic temperatures, further suggesting the suppression of trap sites. Moreover, constructing both the CdS-crown and CdS-shell regions, signifi cantly enhanced absorption cross-section is achieved. This, together with the suppressed Auger recombination, enables the achievement of the lowest threshold amplifi ed spontaneous emission (≈20 µJ cm −2 ) from the core/crown@shell NPLs among all different architectures of NPLs. These fi ndings indicate that carefully heterostructured NPLs will play a critical role in building high-performance colloidal optoelectronic devices, which may even possibly challenge their traditional epitaxially grown thin-fi lm based counterparts.
Colloidal semiconductor nanoplatelets (NPLs) offer important benefits in nanocrystal optoelectronics with their unique excitonic properties. For NPLs, colloidal atomic layer deposition (c‐ALD) provides the ability to produce their core/shell heterostructures. However, as c‐ALD takes place at room temperature, this technique allows for only limited stability and low quantum yield. Here, highly stable, near‐unity efficiency CdSe/ZnS NPLs are shown using hot‐injection (HI) shell growth performed at 573 K, enabling routinely reproducible quantum yields up to 98%. These CdSe/ZnS HI‐shell hetero‐NPLs fully recover their initial photoluminescence (PL) intensity in solution after a heating cycle from 300 to 525 K under inert gas atmosphere, and their solid films exhibit 100% recovery of their initial PL intensity after a heating cycle up to 400 K under ambient atmosphere, by far outperforming the control group of c‐ALD shell‐coated CdSe/ZnS NPLs, which can sustain only 20% of their PL. In optical gain measurements, these core/HI‐shell NPLs exhibit ultralow gain thresholds reaching ≈7 µJ cm−2. Despite being annealed at 500 K, these ZnS‐HI‐shell NPLs possess low gain thresholds as small as 25 µJ cm−2. These findings indicate that the proposed 573 K HI‐shell‐grown CdSe/ZnS NPLs hold great promise for extraordinarily high performance in nanocrystal optoelectronics.
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