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An efficient and surface-benign purification scheme for colloidal nanocrystals based on quantitative assessment

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Abstract

General application of “greener methods” to the synthesis of monodisperse colloidal nanocrystals introduces impurities, including metal carboxylate precursors, non-volatile solvents, free ligands, and non-nanocrystalline side products. These impurities seriously diminish the solution processability and potential applications of colloidal nanocrystals. A protocol was established for evaluating purification schemes. The results revealed that commonly applied purification schemes and their variants do not exhibit a high level of performance and may degrade the ligand surface coverage. A new scheme involving chloroform–acetonitrile precipitation quantitatively removed all impurities from colloidal solutions of CdSe and CdS nanocrystals coated with a variety of carboxylate ligands. The new scheme was benign to the surface structure of nanocrystal-ligands complexes and resulted in each nanocrystal bearing a close-packed monolayer of carboxylate ligands.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Chemistry of Novel & High-Performance Materials, Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Yu Yang, Jiongzhao Li, Long Lin & Xiaogang Peng

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  1. Yu Yang
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  2. Jiongzhao Li
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  3. Long Lin
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  4. Xiaogang Peng
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Correspondence to Xiaogang Peng.

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Yang, Y., Li, J., Lin, L. et al. An efficient and surface-benign purification scheme for colloidal nanocrystals based on quantitative assessment. Nano Res. 8, 3353–3364 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-015-0835-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-015-0835-6

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