Chemistry of Doped Colloidal Nanocrystals

Review. Synthetic control over inorg. nanocrystals has made dramatic strides so that a great no. of binary and a few ternary or more complex compds. can now be prepd. with good control over size and phys. properties. Recently, chemists have tackled the long-standing challenge of introducing dopant atoms into nanocrystals, and strategies that apply across diverse compns. are beginning to emerge. In this review, we 1st briefly summarize the array of characterization methods used to assess doping efficacy for ref. throughout the discussion. We then enumerate chem. strategies for doping with illustrative examples from the literature. A key concept is that the reactions leading to growth of the host crystal and to deposition of dopant ions must be balanced to succeed in incorporating dopants during crystal growth. This challenge has been met through various chem. strategies, and new methods, such as postsynthetic diffusion of dopant ions, continue to be developed. The opportunity to deliver new functionality by doping nanocrystals is great, particularly as characterization methods and synthetic control over introduction of multiple dopants advance