Project NANOPTO

NANOPTO is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions Individual Fellowship that aims at developing novel physicochemical routes to obtain a semiconductor matrix embedding dispersed quantum-dots starting from colloidal nanocrystals. In recent years, a multitude of different semiconductor materials have been synthesized and studied to increase the performance of current technologies or to develop new and attractive applications. As a first-order approximation, materials boosting high photoluminescence quantum yield possess low or hindered charge mobility as, for example, pristine colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs). To overcome this limitation, many different NC processing techniques have been developed, but all of them either cause the formation of charge trap-states on the NC surface (thus quenching the photoluminescence) or do not significantly enhance the charge mobility. For this reason, NANOPTO will tackle this fundamental limitation of NCs by developing novel general methods to enhance their charge mobility without creating surface trap-states, thus leading the way to the development of more efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and solar cells that can be processed in solution. In particular, NANOPTO aims at exploiting both chemical and physical routes to prepare colloidal NCs and solder them in solid-state thus creating a bulk semiconductor matrix (granting enhance charge mobility) embedding quantum-dots (granting the desired optical properties).