Chemical and optical properties of CdSe and CdSe/ZnS nanocrystals investigated using high-performance liquid chromatography

We apply a variety of characterization tools, including dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution size-exclusion chromatography (HRSEC), and X-ray fluorescence (XRF), to study CdSe and CdSe/ZnS semiconductor nanocrystals of various sizes. We compare the size monodispersity, composition, and optical properties such as absorbance, photoluminescence (PL), and photoluminescence excitation of samples synthesized by high-temperature organometallic decomposition methods to CdSe clusters synthesized in our laboratory using a room-temperature metathesis from ionic precursors in coordinating solvents. DLS revealed considerable aggregation in all the conventionally synthesized samples, while TEM showed significant size and shape polydispersity in the core/shell CdSe/ZnS nanoparticles. We demonstrate how HRSEC can be used to explore size and shape polydispersity in semiconductor nanocrystals by measurement of the spectral homogeneity of the PL and PLE of spectra obtained within cluster elution peaks observed by HRSEC. Using HRSEC, we show that size fractionation by solvent/nonsolvent precipitation is only partially effective in size selection and that discrete size populations are present in each fraction. HRSEC shows that our synthesis yields a single-size, blue-emitting, homogeneous population whose absorbance and PL correspond to those of the smallest-size fraction made by conventional synthesis. This suggests that especially stable discrete sizes are favored in both synthetic methods.