Symposium EL10-Understanding the Inorganic-Organic Interface—The Case of Colloidal Nanoscale Materials

Colloidal inorganic nanocrystals exhibit size-, composition- and shape-tunable optical and electronic properties. These include plasmonic metal nanostructures, magic size nanoclusters, magnetic nanocrystals, as well as luminescent semiconductor and perovskite quantum dots. They have generated great scientific interest over the past three decades, for use in many energy- and bio-related areas, e.g., photovoltaic, light emitting and other optoelectronic devices, catalysis, biosensing and in vivo tissue imaging. These materials share one important characteristic. They have large surface areas, which provide many opportunities for manipulating their shape, their size and other properties via interfacial passivation using bifunctional organic molecules, polymers, metal-free inorganic ligands and even biomolecules.

The coating, which controls the interface between these materials and the surrounding environment, is very complex, yet crucially important to all aspects affecting their behavior. The nature of the ligands, their density and lateral extension play an important role in defining the nanomaterials properties, e.g., long-term stability (colloidal and structural), hydrodynamic size, absorption, fluorescence emission and carrier transport properties. A thorough understanding of the interface is essential for optimizing the material’s performance in all conditions. Several highly effective characterization strategies have been applied to various colloidal nanomaterials and data have yielded new and remarkably detailed information and understanding of these systems. These techniques include a battery of 1D and 2D NMR spectroscopy techniques, X-ray diffraction and small angle X-ray scattering, XPS, EDX, FT-IR, and mass spectrometry.

This symposium intends to bring together a group of chemists, physicists, biologists and engineers actively using such tools to characterize and understand the interfacial properties of these systems and their implications in various technological applications.

Topics will include:

Understanding the interfacial properties of semiconductor quantum dots, metallic and magnetic nanocrystals (i.e., surface chemistry, colloidal stabilization, solution processing, …)
Passivation and stabilization of perovskite nanocrystals.
Passivation of perovskite thin films (including all inorganic and organic/inorganic hybrids)
The importance of Lewis acids/bases interactions
Characterization of the interface using advanced spectroscopy techniques (e.g., fluorescence spectroscopy, NMR spectroscopy, FTIR spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy)
Energy transfer interactions (e.g., Förster type and triplet-triplet annihilation)
Electron/Charge transfer interactions and their implication in photocatalytic properties
Modeling of the surface properties
Integration into optoelectronic devices (photovoltaic and light-emitting devices)

Invited Speakers:

Moungi G. Bawendi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Maryna Bodnarchuk (Empa–Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland)
Ou Chen (Brown University, USA)
Bruce Cohen (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
Nikolai Gaponik (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)
Andrew B. Greytak (University of South Carolina, USA)
Zeger Hens (Ghent University, Belgium)
Sandrine Ithurria (École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, France)
Eunjoo Jang (Samsung Electronics, Republic of Korea)
Lea Nienhaus (Florida State University, USA)
Jonatan S. Owen (Columbia University, USA)
Wolfgang Parak (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Teresa Pellegrino (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy)
Lakshmi Polavarapu (University of Vigo, Spain)
Thomas Pons (École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, France)
Loredana Protesescu (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
Elena V. Shevchenko (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Andrew M. Smith (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
William A. Tisdale (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)