Low-temperature synthesis of CdS nanocrystals in aliphatic alcohols

Abstract: In this report a novel low temperature synthesis approach of CdS nanocrystals is described starting from well known precursors, Cd(SA) and TOP-S, in a ligand system of aliphatic long chain alcohols. A one-pot synthesis approach is applied using a laboratory microwave heating source. The resulting CdS nanocrystals exhibit an absorbance with a pronounced fine-structure, a photoluminescence with a very high ratio between the band gap peak and the defect peak and a fluorescence quantum yield of 33%. Different synthesis approaches have been investigated by changing heating rate, temperature, precursor concentration and chain length of the aliphatic alcohol ligand as well as chain length of the Cadmium precursor. It was found that small changes in the heating rate do not affect the reaction. Changing the reaction temperature between 200°C and 160°C has no visible effects on the quality of the resulting CdS nanocrystals. At 140°C the nanoparticles experience a significant drop in quality, probably because there is a major change in the growth mechanism of the nanocrystals at that low temperature. At 100°C and 120°C the creation of so-called CdS nanoclusters is observed, and a growth mechanism towards nanocrystals based on cluster aggregation is suggested. For the synthesis of high quality nanoparticles it was found that a ratio of 1:25 between precursor and aliphatic alcohol is preferable as well as a ratio of 1:1 between the two precursors. If the chain length of both the precursors and the alcohol is short, the reaction rate is enhanced. If the chain length is too short the nanocrystals grow very fast and the size distribution gets broad, the photoluminescence intensity decreases and the ratio between band gap luminescence and defect luminescence decreases. The best Cd-precursor was found to be Cd-Laurate and the most suitable ligand evaluated was Tetradecanol.