Scaling Up Lead Sulfur Nano-Platelets

Nano-crystal (NC) structures have long promised to revolutionize science and technology, due to its fascinating properties rising when materials dimensions shrink down to nanometer scale. Devices in which their operating units will be scaled down to nanometer scale, are expected to be more efficient for application. The benefits of NC structures have been applied across various applications up-to-date, medicine, biology, energy conversion, catalysis, sensing, nanocomposite engineering and cosmetics.

Currently working on the lead chalcogenides due to their optical activity in the near infrared (IR) spectra regime. These NCs have bulk energy-gaps, 0.29 eV and 0.41 eV and large Bohr radii 46 nm and 18 nm for PbSe and PbS, respectively. Thus, when shrinking the material to nano-size, the electronic energy bands split into discrete states, shifting these transitions to higher energies. Also their two dimensional form give them extra credit due to excellent mechanical and thermal stability and the ability to prepare them by wet chemistry methods, making them attractive materials for low-cost and scalable solution-processed optoelectronic devices. In particular, platelets-based solar cells are considered to be most promising due to the expected great increase in the device efficiency.

However, when developing application we need to drop the costs associated to the fabrication and the assemblage of such NCs. which eventually will be integrated as a key component of devices, while at the same time the material quality and the reproducibility of the various processes must keep improving. So I am working on developing straightforward and reproducible synthetic procedures that provides large amounts of at laboratory needs. For that purpose I have arranged a setup of jacketed reactor which is heated with oil circulator and mechanical stirrer to preserve the reaction heat and mass transfer, with the ability to observe the reaction parameters.