Core and core-shell nanomaterials synthesis for Optoelectronics

Nanoscience and technology, which involves the manipulation of materials using the property of size to bring about specific desired changes in the electronic structure of materials, has proven to be a powerful additional tool permitting the materials scientist to effect greater control over the charge transport properties in materials. While this is considered to be an exciting prospect, one of the challenges yet to be overcome is how to manipulate the transport of multicomponent materials (MCMs) at the nanoscale. In order to gain an understanding of how MCMs can be manipulated in order to achieve desirable electronic properties for device manufacture the materials need to be reproducibly made, attached to substrates and their charge carrier transport properties investigated.

This project aims to: (i) intelligently design a number of different semiconductor material combinations and characterise their comparative electronic structure via the optical response of their dilute solutions (ii) manipulate the surface chemistry of the different material architectures with short chained ligands and assess any changes in their electronic structure that result from such attachments (iii) assemble the materials with the appropriate surface chemistry into different device architectures as single non-interacting nano-objects (core, core-shell) and (iv) characterise their optical and optoelectronic properties in device architectures to determine their charge transport efficiency.