Photophysical and structural characterisation of in situ formed quantum dots

Conjugated polymer-semiconductor quantum dot (QD) composites are attracting increasing attention due to the complementary properties of the two classes of materials. We report a convenient method for in situ formation of QDs, and explore the conditions required for light emission of nanocomposite blends. In particular we explore the properties of nanocomposites of the blue emitting polymer poly[9,9-bis(3,5-di-tert-butylphenyl)-9H-fluorene] together with cadmium sulphide (CdS) and cadmium selenide (CdSe) precursors. We show the formation of emissive quantum dots of CdSe from thermally decomposed precursor. The dots are formed inside the polymer matrix and have a photoluminescence quantum yield of 7.5%. Our results show the importance of appropriate energy level alignment, and are relevant to the application of organic-inorganic systems in optoelectronic devices.

Citation

Bansal , A K , Antolini , F , Sajjad , M T , Stroea , L , Mazzaro , R , Ramkumar , S G , Kass , K -J , Allard , S , Scherf , U & Samuel , I D W 2014 , ' Photophysical and structural characterisation of in situ formed quantum dots ' , Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics , vol. 16 , no. 20 , pp. 9556-9564 . https://doi.org/10.1039/c4cp00727a

Publication

Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1039/c4cp00727a

ISSN

1463-9076

Type

Journal article

Rights

Description

The authors acknowledge financial support from FP7 project “Laser Induced Synthesis of Polymeric Nanocomposite Materials and Development of Micro-patterned Hybrid Light Emitting Diodes (LED) and Transistors (LET)” – LAMP project (G.A. 247928). AKB and IDWS also acknowledge financial support from EPSRC Programme grant “Challenging the limits of photonics: Structured light” EP/J01771X/1.

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5196