Transient reshaping of intraband transitions by hot electrons

Hole Relaxation Bottlenecks in CdSe/CdTe/CdSe Lateral Heterostructures Lead to Bicolor Emission

Concentric lateral CdSe/CdTe/CdSe heterostructures show bicolor photoluminescence from both a red charge transfer band of the CdSe/CdTe interface and a green fluorescence from CdSe. This work uses visible and near-infrared transient spectroscopy measurements to demonstrate that the deviation from Kasha's rule arises from a hole relaxation bottleneck from CdSe to CdTe. Hole transfer can take up to 1 ns, which permits radiative relaxation of excitons remaining in CdSe. Simulations indicate that the hole relaxation bottleneck arises due to the sparse density of states and poor spatial overlap of hole states at energies near the CdSe band edge. The divergent kinetics of transfer for band edge and hot holes is exploited to vary the ratio of green and red photoluminescence with excitation wavelength, providing another knob to control emission color. These findings support the use of lateral heterojunctions as a method for slowing carrier relaxation in two-dimensional materials.

2D II-VI Semiconductor Nanoplatelets: From Material Synthesis to Optoelectronic Integration

The field of colloidal synthesis of semiconductors emerged 40 years ago and has reached a certain level of maturity thanks to the use of nanocrystals as phosphors in commercial displays. In particular, II-VI semiconductors based on cadmium, zinc, or mercury chalcogenides can now be synthesized with tailored shapes, composition by alloying, and even as nanocrystal heterostructures. Fifteen years ago, II-VI semiconductor nanoplatelets injected new ideas into this field. Indeed, despite the emergence of other promising semiconductors such as halide perovskites or 2D transition metal dichalcogenides, colloidal II-VI semiconductor nanoplatelets remain among the narrowest room-temperature emitters that can be synthesized over a wide spectral range, and they exhibit good material stability over time. Such nanoplatelets are scientifically and technologically interesting because they exhibit optical features and production advantages at the intersection of those expected from colloidal quantum dots and epitaxial quantum wells. In organic solvents, gram-scale syntheses can produce nanoparticles with the same thicknesses and optical properties without inhomogeneous broadening. In such nanoplatelets, quantum confinement is limited to one dimension, defined at the atomic scale, which allows them to be treated as quantum wells. In this review, we discuss the synthetic developments, spectroscopic properties, and applications of such nanoplatelets. Covering growth mechanisms, we explain how a thorough understanding of nanoplatelet growth has enabled the development of nanoplatelets and heterostructured nanoplatelets with multiple emission colors, spatially localized excitations, narrow emission, and high quantum yields over a wide spectral range. Moreover, nanoplatelets, with their large lateral extension and their thin short axis and low dielectric surroundings, can support one or several electron-hole pairs with large exciton binding energies. Thus, we also discuss how the relaxation processes and lifetime of the carriers and excitons are modified in nanoplatelets compared to both spherical quantum dots and epitaxial quantum wells. Finally, we explore how nanoplatelets, with their strong and narrow emission, can be considered as ideal candidates for pure-color light emitting diodes (LEDs), strong gain media for lasers, or for use in luminescent light concentrators.

Hot-carrier photocatalysts for artificial photosynthesis

We applied hot-carrier extraction to particulate photocatalysts for artificial photosynthetic reactions including water splitting for H₂ production and CO₂ reduction to CO and HCOOH, and elucidated promising features of hot-carrier photocatalysts (HC-PCs). We designed a specific structure of the HC-PC; a semiconductor core in which thermalization of photo-generated carriers is significantly suppressed is surrounded by a shell whose bandgap is wider than that of the core. Among the photo-generated hot carriers in the core, only carriers whose energies are larger than the shell bandgap are extracted passing through the shell to the active sites on the shell surface. Thus, the shell functions as an energy-selective contact. We calculated the upper bounds of the rates of the carrier supply from the core to the active sites using a newly constructed detailed-balance model including partial thermalization and nonradiative recombination of the carriers. It has been revealed that the HC-PCs can yield higher carrier-supply rates and thus potentially higher solar-to-chemical energy conversion efficiencies for H₂ and CO production than those of conventional photocatalysts with the assistance of intraband transition and Auger recombination/impact ionization. It should be noted, however, that one of the necessary conditions for efficient hot-carrier extraction is sufficiently large carrier density in the core, which, in turn, requires concentrated solar illumination by several hundreds. This would raise rate-limiting problems of activities of the chemical reactions induced by the photo-generated carriers and material-transfer properties.