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SYOH: Organic and Hybrid Systems for Future Electronics

SYOH 8: Hybrid Systems

SYOH 8.1: Invited Talk

Friday, March 12, 2004, 12:10–12:40, H1

Inorganic Nanorods: Synthesis, Properties, Photovoltaic Applications — •Delia Milliron, Ilan Gur, and Paul Alivisatos — University of California, Berkeley, College of Chemistry, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Inorganic nanocrystals with well defined shapes are important for understanding basic size-dependent scaling laws, and may be useful in a wide range of applications. Methods for controlling the shapes of inorganic nanocrystals are evolving rapidly. This talk will focus on a strategy that involves pyrolysis of organometallic precursors in mixtures of hot organic surfactants. The surfactant mixtures can be used to control the growth rates of different facets of the nanocrystals, allowing for wide tunability of shape. This will be illustrated with CdSe and Co nanocrystals. Both of these materials show pronounced variation of fundamental properties with aspect ratio. The semiconductor nanorods can be embedded in plastic films, and they can be aligned in a variety of ways. This talk will describe recent work on the production of solar cells based on nanoscale composites of CdSe nanorods and poly-alkyl thiophene semiconductor polymers, as well as very recent results on the isolation of liquid crystal phases of semiconductor nanorods. Finally, we will present recent results on the synthesis of colloidal semiconductor heterostructures with well-controlled branch points.