Quantum Dot Display Science and Technology

Chapter 2Quantum Dot Material Systems, Compositional Families

Sudarsan Tamang¹, Karl David Wegner², Peter Reiss³

¹ Department of Chemistry, School of Physical Sciences, Sikkim University, Sikkim, India

² Division Biophotonics, Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und – prüfung (BAM), Berlin, Germany

³ University of Grenoble Alpes, CEA, CNRS, Grenoble-INP, IRIG-SyMMES, Grenoble, France

2.1 Introduction

Following the discovery of the quantum confinement effect in the early 1980s, it took more than 10 years to be able to synthesize monodisperse colloidal quantum dots (QDs) using organometallic chemistry approaches. The researchers behind these pioneering works, Alexey Ekimov, Louis Brus, and Moungi Bawendi, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023, exactly 30 years after the seminal report on the preparation of cadmium chalcogenide QDs [1]. From the synthetic point of view, this approach, relying on the fast injection of a chalcogenide precursor dissolved in a tertiary phosphine into a hot solution of the cadmium precursor in a coordinating solvent (trioctylphosphine oxide, TOPO) acting at the same time as surface ligand, was revolutionary. It enabled the fast synthesis of well-crystallized CdS, CdSe, and CdTe QDs of low size dispersion and high colloidal stability, whose size and hence optical and electronic properties could be conveniently tuned with the reaction time. Due to the comparable ease of this method and the later developed shelling procedures with ZnS, ZnSe, ...