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Photoluminescence: Nanocrystals play hot potato

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 2, Article number: 0107 (2018) Cite this article

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Exciting a semiconductor often yields a triplet exciton, which can be transferred to a nearby chromophore through a Dexter process, whereby an electron in the conduction band hops to the chromophore's LUMO, and an electron in the chromophore's HOMO hops to the valence band. This exchange-induced energy transfer is reversible as the exciton can be transferred back and forth, provided the gaps between the respective frontier orbitals or bands are comparable. Castellano's team further developed the pyrene–CdSe system by preparing differently sized monodisperse CdSe nanocrystals and treating them with 1-pyrenecarboxylic acid. Irradiating a sample containing small (2.4 nm) nanocrystals affords a high-energy first exciton (λ = 488 nm), whose transfer to the pyrene groups is so far downhill (0.51 eV) that the reverse transfer is not observed. Indeed, the pyrenes behave as they would in solution, either phosphorescing over the course of 50 ms or transferring energy to molecules in a process applicable to catalysis or photodynamic therapy.

Generating delayed photoluminescence in nanocrystals may be valuable in solid-state lighting and background-free time-resolved imaging

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References

  1. Mongin, C., Moroz, P., Zamkov, M. & Castellani, F. N. Thermally activated delayed photoluminescence from pyrenyl-functionalized CdSe quantum dots. Nat. Chem.https://doi.org/10.1038/NCHEM.2906 (2017)

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  1. David Schilter
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Schilter, D. Photoluminescence: Nanocrystals play hot potato. Nat Rev Chem 2, 0107 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-017-0107

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