Doped group-IV semiconductor nanocrystals

Doped semiconductor nanocrystals offer great potential for microelectronics and integrated optoelectronics. Nanocrystal based technology is promising for several fields of technology such as thin conducting films, light emitting devices, tunable lasers, transistors, photovoltaics, and less harmful alternatives to toxic fluorescent dyes for application in bio-imaging, to name a few. While properties of nanocrystals are tunable through their size, considerable research is underway to explore the influence of dopants on the properties of semiconductor nanocrystals. The introduction of dopants has been elusive for these confined structures due to their nanoscale sizes as well as the possibility of making them degenerate even with the addition of very small quantities of the dopant. Here, we present a facile, low-cost procedure that we have developed for the synthesis of non-degenerate doped semiconductor nanocrystals and study their properties.