Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

Part one: Doping Colloidal Quantum Dots

Semiconductor quantum dots exhibit fascinating and important physical and chemical properties that can hold the potential to play crucial role in transforming the photovoltaic industry, creating new business opportunities and producing electricity to address the increasing global energy needs. Producing relatively efficient solar cells from quantum dots has been already demonstrated by many research groups. An important goal is to better equip these quantum dots for photovoltaic cells by controlling their electrical properties via chemical doping. The challenge of doping process is to control the chemical synthesis of these quantum dots to increase uniformity of the resulting doped quantum dots. In the discussion, gallium, tin and indium doping of CdSe quantum dots will be used as examples to highlight these challenges as well as demonstrate possible solutions for the challenges.

Part 2: Building THz reaction control group at the Extreme Light Infrastructure in Hungary

At the Extreme Light Infrastructure in Hungary (http://www.eli-hu.hu/), our group is implementing an experimental arrangement to study energy disposal of small fragments from photodissociation processes in the in visible energy range. With the help of ELI we will be able to carry out experiments with pulsed XUV sources to obtain insight into the dynamics of photofragmentation in the 5-20 eV with high frequency (0.01 cm-1) and high temporal resolution (attosecond to femtosecond). We will conduct experiments with the SYLOS laser source to investigate the possibility of controlling energy disposal in the samples chemical reactions and photodissociation processes. The high pulse energy will be also used to produce very strong terahertz pulses (narrow band upto 300 kV/cm) to provide an optical electric field bias during photodissociation. This optical bias will be a key experimental tool to control energy disposal in molecular fragments via a quasi-DC STARK