New “lava dot” particles were discovered accidentally when researchers stumbled upon a way of using molten droplets of metal salt to make hollow, coated versions of a nanotech staple called quantum dots. The researchers also found that lava dots arrange themselves in evenly spaced patterns on flat surfaces, thanks in part to a soft outer coating that can alter its shape when the particles are tightly packed.
“We’re exploring potential of using these particles as catalysts for hydrogen production, as chemical sensors and as components in solar cells, but the main point of this paper is how we make these materials,” said co-author Michael Wong, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice. “We came up with this ‘molten-droplet synthesis’ technique and found we can use the same process to make hollow nano-size particles out of several kinds of elements. The upshot is that this discovery is about a whole family of particles rather than one specific composition.”
Like their quantum dot cousins, Rice’s lava dots can be made of semiconductors like cadmium selenide and zinc sulfide.
A nine-pack of lava dots created at Rice. Photo by Sravani Gullapalli
Nanotechnology Journal – Molten-droplet synthesis of composite CdSe hollow nanoparticles
“This new chemistry to make the tetrapods was fairly cheap, but we were looking for an even cheaper way,” Wong said. “Sravani said, ‘Let’s get rid of this expensive phosphorus surfactant and just see what happens.’ So she did, and these little things just popped out on the electron microscope screen.”
To make the particles, Gullapalli added three kinds of solid powder — cadmium nitrate, selenium and a tiny amount of CTAB — to an oil solvent. She then slowly heated the mixture while stirring. The cadmium nitrate melted first and formed tiny nanodroplets that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
“Nothing happens until the temperature continues to rise and the selenium melts,” Gullapalli said. “The molten selenium then wraps around the cadmium nitrate droplet, and the cadmium nitrate diffuses out and leaves a hole where the droplet once was.”
She said the cadmium selenide shell surrounding the hole is nanocrystalline and is enveloped in a soft outer shell of pure selenium.
When Gullapalli examined the lava dots with a transmission electron microscope, she found them to be bigger than standard quantum dots, about 15-20 nanometers in diameter. The holes were about 4-5 nanometers in diameter. She also noticed something peculiar: When sitting by themselves they appeared round, and when tightly packed, the shell appeared to become compressed, even though neighboring dots never came into actual contact with one another.
“That’s one of the twists to this weird chemistry,” Wong said. “The solvent forms its own surfactant during this process. The surfactant coats the particles and keeps them from touching each other, even when they are tightly packed together.”
Wong’s team later found it could use the molten droplet method to make lava dots out of zinc sulfide, cadmium sulfide and zinc selenide.
“We found that the hollow particles met and even exceeded some performance metrics of quantum dots in a solar-cell test device, and we’re continuing to examine how these might be useful,” Gullapalli said.
ABSTRACT – Many colloidal synthesis routes are not scalable to high production rates, especially for nanoparticles of complex shape or composition, due to precursor expense and hazards, low yields, and the large number of processing steps. The present work describes a strategy to synthesize hollow nanoparticles (HNPs) out of metal chalcogenides, based on the slow heating of a low-melting-point metal salt, an elemental chalcogen, and an alkylammonium surfactant in octadecene solvent. The synthesis and characterization of CdSe HNPs with an outer diameter of 15.6 ± 3.5 nm and a shell thickness of 5.4 ± 0.9 nm are specifically detailed here. The HNP synthesis is proposed to proceed with the formation of alkylammonium-stabilized nano-sized droplets of molten cadmium salt, which then come into contact with dissolved selenium species to form a CdSe shell at the droplet surface. In a reaction–diffusion mechanism similar to the nanoscale Kirkendall effect it is speculated that the cadmium migrates outwardly through this shell to react with more selenium, causing the CdSe shell to thicken. The proposed CdSe HNP structure comprises a polycrystalline CdSe shell coated with a thin layer of amorphous selenium. Photovoltaic device characterization indicates that HNPs have improved electron transport characteristics compared to standard CdSe quantum dots, possibly due to this selenium layer. The HNPs are colloidally stable in organic solvents even though carboxylate, phosphine, and amine ligands are absent; stability is attributed to octadecene-selenide species bound to the particle surface. This scalable synthesis method presents opportunities to generate hollow nanoparticles with increased structural and compositional variety.
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