Lead halide perovskites (LHPs) in the form of nanometre-sized colloidal crystals, or nanocrystals (NCs), have attracted the attention of diverse materials scientists due to their unique optical versatility, high photoluminescence quantum yields and facile synthesis. LHP NCs have a 'soft' and predominantly ionic lattice, and their optical and electronic properties are highly tolerant to structural defects and surface states. Therefore, they cannot be approached with the same experimental mindset and theoretical framework as conventional semiconductor NCs. In this Review, we discuss LHP NCs historical and current research pursuits, challenges in applications, and the related present and future mitigation strategies explored.

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Genesis, challenges and opportunities for colloidal lead halide perovskite nanocrystals

Chemical methods developed over the past two decades enable preparation of colloidal nanocrystals with uniform size and shape. These Brownian objects readily order into superlattices. Recently, the range of accessible inorganic cores and tunable surface chemistries dramatically increased, expanding the set of nanocrystal arrangements experimentally attainable. In this review, we discuss efforts to create next-generation materials via bottom-up organization of nanocrystals with preprogrammed functionality and self-assembly instructions. This process is often driven by both interparticle interactions and the influence of the assembly environment. The introduction provides the reader with a practical overview of nanocrystal synthesis, self-assembly, and superlattice characterization. We then summarize the theory of nanocrystal interactions and examine fundamental principles governing nanocrystal self-assembly from hard and soft particle perspectives borrowed from the comparatively established fields of micro...

Self-Assembly of Colloidal Nanocrystals: From Intricate Structures to Functional Materials

All nanomaterials share a common feature of large surface-to-volume ratio, making their surfaces the dominant player in many physical and chemical processes. Surface ligands - molecules that bind to the surface - are an essential component of nanomaterial synthesis, processing and application. Understanding the structure and properties of nanoscale interfaces requires an intricate mix of concepts and techniques borrowed from surface science and coordination chemistry. Our Review elaborates these connections and discusses the bonding, electronic structure and chemical transformations at nanomaterial surfaces. We specifically focus on the role of surface ligands in tuning and rationally designing properties of functional nanomaterials. Given their importance for biomedical (imaging, diagnostics and therapeutics) and optoelectronic (light-emitting devices, transistors, solar cells) applications, we end with an assessment of application-targeted surface engineering.

The surface science of nanocrystals.

Colloidal nanocrystals (NCs, i.e., crystalline nanoparticles) have become an important class of materials with great potential for applications ranging from medicine to electronic and optoelectronic devices. Today’s strong research focus on NCs has been prompted by the tremendous progress in their synthesis. Impressively narrow size distributions of just a few percent, rational shape-engineering, compositional modulation, electronic doping, and tailored surface chemistries are now feasible for a broad range of inorganic compounds. The performance of inorganic NC-based photovoltaic and light-emitting devices has become competitive to other state-of-the-art materials. Semiconductor NCs hold unique promise for near- and mid-infrared technologies, where very few semiconductor materials are available. On a purely fundamental side, new insights into NC growth, chemical transformations, and self-organization can be gained from rapidly progressing in situ characterization and direct imaging techniques. New phenom...

Prospects of Nanoscience with Nanocrystals

It is conventionally assumed that the growth of monodisperse colloidal nanocrystals requires a temporally discrete nucleation followed by monomer attachment onto the existing nuclei. However, recent studies have reported violations of this classical growth model, and have suggested that inter-particle interactions are also involved during the growth. Mechanisms of nanocrystal growth still remain controversial. Using in situ transmission electron microscopy, we show that platinum nanocrystals can grow either by monomer attachment from solution onto the existing particles or by coalescence between the particles. Surprisingly, an initially broad size distribution of the nanocrystals can spontaneously narrow. We suggest that nanocrystals take different pathways of growth based on their size- and morphology-dependent internal energies. These observations are expected to be highly relevant for other nanocrystal systems.

Observation of Single Colloidal Platinum Nanocrystal Growth Trajectories

Nature Materials 15, 141–153 (2016); published online 22 January 2016; corrected after print 27 January 2016. In the version of this Review Article originally published, the righthand panel of Fig. 1b was incorrect. The correct Figure is shown below and this error has been corrected in the online versions of the Review Article.

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Erratum: The surface science of nanocrystals

This work analyzes the role of hydrocarbon ligands in the self-assembly of nanocrystal (NC) superlattices. Typical NCs, composed of an inorganic core of radius R and a layer of capping ligands with length L, can be described as soft spheres with softness parameter L/R. Using particle tracking measurements of transmission electron microscopy images, we find that close-packed NCs, like their hard-sphere counterparts, fill space at approximately 74% density independent of softness. We uncover deformability of the ligand capping layer that leads to variable effective NC size in response to the coordination environment. This effect plays an important role in the packing of particles in binary nanocrystal superlattices (BNSLs). Measurements on BNSLs composed of NCs of varying softness in several coordination geometries indicate that NCs deform to produce dense BNSLs that would otherwise be low-density arrangements if the particles remained spherical. Consequently, rationalizing the mixing of two NC species duri...

Many-body effects in nanocrystal superlattices: departure from sphere packing explains stability of binary phases.

Controlling the spontaneous organization of nanoscale objects remains a fundamental challenge of materials design. Here we present the first characterization of self-assembled superlattices (SLs) comprised of tetrahedral nanocrystal (NCs). We observe self-assembly of CdSe nanotetrahedra into an open structure (estimated space-filling fraction φ ≈ 0.59) which has not been anticipated by many recent theoretical studies and simulations of tetrahedron packings. This finding highlights a gap in the understanding of the hierarchy of energy scales acting on colloidal NCs during self-assembly. We propose a strong dependence of ligand–ligand interaction potential on NC surface curvature. This effect favors spatial proximity of vertices in the dense colloidal crystal and may be considered an emergent “patchiness” acting through chemically identical ligand molecules.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja501596z

Michael A. Boles

Papers

Self-Assembly of Colloidal Nanocrystals: From Intricate Structures to Functional Materials

The surface science of nanocrystals.

Erratum: The surface science of nanocrystals

Many-body effects in nanocrystal superlattices: departure from sphere packing explains stability of binary phases.

Self-assembly of tetrahedral CdSe nanocrystals: effective "patchiness" via anisotropic steric interaction.