Giant Alloyed Hot Injection Shells Enable Ultralow Optical Gain Threshold in Colloidal Quantum Wells

As an attractive materials system for high-performance optoelectronics, colloidal nanoplatelets (NPLs) benefit from atomic-level precision in thickness, minimizing emission inhomogeneous broadening. Much progress has been made to enhance their photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) and photostability. However, to date, layer-by-layer growth of shells at room temperature has resulted in defects that limit PLQY and thus curtail the performance of NPLs as an optical gain medium. Here, we introduce a hot-injection method growing giant alloyed shells using an approach that reduces core/shell lattice mismatch and suppresses Auger recombination. Near-unity PLQY is achieved with a narrow full-width-at-half-maximum (20 nm), accompanied by emission tunability (from 610 to 650 nm). The biexciton lifetime exceeds 1 ns, an order of magnitude longer than in conventional colloidal quantum dots (CQDs). Reduced Auger recombination enables record-low amplified spontaneous emission threshold of 2.4 μJ cm^-2 under one-photon pumping. This is lower by a factor of 2.5 than the best previously reported value in nanocrystals (6 μJ cm^-2 for CdSe/CdS NPLs). Here, we also report single-mode lasing operation with a 0.55 mJ cm^-2 threshold under two-photoexcitation, which is also the best among nanocrystals (compared to 0.76 mJ cm^-2 from CdSe/CdS CQDs in the Fabry-Pérot cavity). These findings indicate that hot-injection growth of thick alloyed shells makes ultrahigh performance NPLs.

Highly Stable, Near-Unity Efficiency Atomically Flat Semiconductor Nanocrystals of CdSe/ZnS Hetero-Nanoplatelets Enabled by ZnS-Shell Hot-Injection Growth

Colloidal semiconductor nanoplatelets (NPLs) offer important benefits in nanocrystal optoelectronics with their unique excitonic properties. For NPLs, colloidal atomic layer deposition (c-ALD) provides the ability to produce their core/shell heterostructures. However, as c-ALD takes place at room temperature, this technique allows for only limited stability and low quantum yield. Here, highly stable, near-unity efficiency CdSe/ZnS NPLs are shown using hot-injection (HI) shell growth performed at 573 K, enabling routinely reproducible quantum yields up to 98%. These CdSe/ZnS HI-shell hetero-NPLs fully recover their initial photoluminescence (PL) intensity in solution after a heating cycle from 300 to 525 K under inert gas atmosphere, and their solid films exhibit 100% recovery of their initial PL intensity after a heating cycle up to 400 K under ambient atmosphere, by far outperforming the control group of c-ALD shell-coated CdSe/ZnS NPLs, which can sustain only 20% of their PL. In optical gain measurements, these core/HI-shell NPLs exhibit ultralow gain thresholds reaching ≈7 µJ cm^-2 . Despite being annealed at 500 K, these ZnS-HI-shell NPLs possess low gain thresholds as small as 25 µJ cm^-2 . These findings indicate that the proposed 573 K HI-shell-grown CdSe/ZnS NPLs hold great promise for extraordinarily high performance in nanocrystal optoelectronics.