Writingon Nanocrystals: Patterning Colloidal InorganicNanocrystal Films through Irradiation-Induced Chemical Transformationsof Surface Ligands

摘要

In the past couple of decades, colloidal inorganic nanocrystals (NCs) and, more specifically, semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have emerged as crucial materials for the development of nanoscience and nanotechnology, with applications in very diverse areas such as optoelectronics and biotechnology. Films made of inorganic NCs deposited on a substrate can be patterned by e-beam lithography, altering the structure of their capping ligands and thus allowing exposed areas to remain on the substrate while non-exposed areas are redispersed in a solvent, as in a standard lift-off process. This methodology can be described as a “direct” lithography process, since the exposure is performed directly on the material of interest, in contrast with conventional lithography which uses a polymeric resist as a mask for subsequent material deposition (or etching). A few reports from the late 1990s and early 2000s used such direct lithography to fabricate electrical wires from metallic NCs. However, the poor conductivity obtained through this process hindered the widespread use of the technique.In the early 2010s, the same method was used to define fluorescentpatterns on QD films, allowing for further applications in biosensing.For the past 2–3 years, direct lithography on NC films withe-beams and X-rays has gone through an important development as ithas been demonstrated that it can tune further transformations onthe NCs, leading to more complex patternings and opening a whole newset of possible applications. This Perspective summarizes the findingsof the past 20 years on direct lithography on NC films with a focuson the latest developments on QDs from 2014 and provides differentpotential future outcomes of this promising technique.