Abstract
Highly luminescent positively charged CdTe nanocrystals were prepared from a facile and reproducible approach by the reaction of Cd2+ and HTe− in the presence of mercaptoethylamine. The influence of various experimental variables, including pH value, growth temperature, Te-to-Cd ratio, as well as Cd-to-ligand ratio, on the growth rate and optical properties of CdTe nanocrystals have been systematically investigated. Experimental results indicate that the pH value and Te-to-Cd molar ratio play the crucial role in determining luminescent properties of the obtained CdTe nanocrystals. The mechanism for the resulting high-quality optical properties of the resulting CdTe nanocrystals was also elucidated.
We thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 20501005, 20771037), the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of China (NCET-06-0417), Pujiang Talents Project (07pj14032), Shuguang Project (06SG33), and SRFDP (20070251014) for financial support.