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Controlled growth of tetrapod-branched inorganic nanocrystals

Nature Materials volume 2, pages 382–385 (2003)Cite this article

Abstract

Nanoscale materials are currently being exploited as active components in a wide range of technological applications in various fields, such as composite materials1,2, chemical sensing3, biomedicine4,5,6, optoelectronics7,8,9 and nanoelectronics10,11,12. Colloidal nanocrystals are promising candidates in these fields, due to their ease of fabrication and processibility. Even more applications and new functional materials might emerge if nanocrystals could be synthesized in shapes of higher complexity than the ones produced by current methods (spheres, rods, discs)13,14,15,16,17,18,19. Here, we demonstrate that polytypism, or the existence of two or more crystal structures in different domains of the same crystal, coupled with the manipulation of surface energy at the nanoscale, can be exploited to produce branched inorganic nanostructures controllably. For the case of CdTe, we designed a high yield, reproducible synthesis of soluble, tetrapod-shaped nanocrystals through which we can independently control the width and length of the four arms.

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Figure 1: Proposed model of a CdTe tetrapod.
Figure 2: Electron microscopy images of CdTe tetrapods.
Figure 3: Time-dependent shape evolution of CdTe tetrapods.
Figure 4: Influence of the shape of CdTe tetrapods on optical absorption spectra.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098 and by Grant No. 066995 through the University of Southern California, under prime sponsor DOD Advanced Research Projects Agency. D.S.M. gratefully acknowledges fellowship support from the US department of Defense. We would like to thank R. Zalpuri and G. Vrdoljak at the UC Berkeley Electron Microscope Lab for their assistance and the use of their TEM. We thank J. W. Jun and M. F. Casula for beneficial discussions.

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  1. Delia J. Milliron and Andreas Meisel: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Berkeley and Materials Sciences Division, University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Liberato Manna, Delia J. Milliron, Andreas Meisel, Erik C. Scher & A. Paul Alivisatos

  2. National Nanotechnology Lab of INFM, Via Arnesano, Lecce, 73100, Italy

    Liberato Manna

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Correspondence to A. Paul Alivisatos.

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Manna, L., Milliron, D., Meisel, A. et al. Controlled growth of tetrapod-branched inorganic nanocrystals. Nature Mater 2, 382–385 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat902

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