Films made of semiconductor nanocrystals — tiny crystals measuring just a few billionths of a meter across — are seen as a promising new material for a wide range of applications. Nanocrystals could be used in electronic or photonic circuits, detectors for biomolecules, or the glowing pixels on high-resolution display screens. They also hold promise for more efficient solar cells.

The size of a semiconductor nanocrystal determines its electrical and optical properties. But it’s very hard to control the placement of nanocrystals on a surface in order to make structurally uniform films. Typical nanocrystal films also have cracks that limit their usefulness and make it impossible to measure the fundamental properties of these materials.

Now, researchers at MIT say they have found ways of making defect-free patterns of nanocrystal films where the shape and position of the films are controlled with nanoscale resolution, potentially opening up a significant area for research and possible new applications.

In the initial phases of the new work, a researcher produced nanoscale patterns that emit invisible infrared light. But working on such systems is tedious, since each fine-tuning has to be checked using time-consuming electron microscopy. So when the reasercher succeeded in getting semiconductor nanocrystal patterns to glow with visible light, making them visible through an optical microscope, it meant that the team could greatly speed the development of the new technology.

The electrical conductivity of the researchers’ defect-free films is roughly 180 times greater than that of the cracked films made by conventional methods. In addition, the process developed by the MIT team has already made it possible to create patterns on a silicon surface that are just 30 nanometers across — about the size of the finest features possible with present manufacturing techniques.

Since the minuscule crystals behave almost like oversized atoms, the researchers aim to use the arrays to study fundamental processes of solids. The success of this technique has already enabled new research on how electrons move in the films.

Such materials could also be used to develop sensitive detectors for tiny amounts of certain biological molecules, either as screening systems for toxins or as medical testing devices.

This story is reprinted from material from MIT, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.