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Surface and intrinsic contributions to extinction properties of ZnSe quantum dots

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Abstract

This work studies extinction properties of ZnSe quantum dots terminated with either Se-surface or Zn-surface (Se-ZnSe or Zn-ZnSe QDs). In addition to commonly observed photoluminescence quenching by anionic surface sites, Se-ZnSe QDs are found to show drastic signatures of Se-surface states in their UV-visible (Vis) absorption spectra. Similar to most QDs reported in literature, monodisperse Zn-ZnSe QDs show sharp absorption features and blue-shifted yet steep absorption edge respect to the bulk bandgap. However, for monodisperse Se-ZnSe QDs, all absorption features are smeared and a low-energy tail is identified to extend to an energy window below the bulk ZnSe bandgap. Along increasing their size, a cyclic growth of ZnSe QDs switches their surface from Zn-terminated to Se-terminated ones, which confirms that the specific absorption signatures are reproducibly repeated between those of two types of the QDs. Though the extinction coefficients per unit of Se-ZnSe QDs are always larger than those of Zn-ZnSe QDs with the same size, both of them approach the same bulk limit. In addition to contribution of the lattice, extinction coefficients per nanocrystal of Zn-ZnSe QDs show an exponential term against their sizes, which is expected for quantum-confinement enhancement of electron-hole wavefunction overlapping. For Se-ZnSe QDs, there is the third term identified for their extinction coefficients per nanocrystal, which is proportional to the square of size of the QDs and consistent with surface contribution.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFB0401600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 91833303), Joint NSFC-ISF Research (No. 21761142009), and the education department of Fujian Province (No. JA13013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Science and Technology, Huaqiao University, Xiamen, 361021, China

    Shangxin Lin

  2. Center for Chemistry of Novel & High-Performance Materials, Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Shangxin Lin, Jiongzhao Li, Chaodan Pu, Hairui Lei, Meiyi Zhu, Haiyan Qin & Xiaogang Peng

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Lin, S., Li, J., Pu, C. et al. Surface and intrinsic contributions to extinction properties of ZnSe quantum dots. Nano Res. 13, 824–831 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2703-2

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