Colloidal nanocrystals (NCs) are used as building blocks for LED's, solar cells, transistors and other devices with semiconductor junctions. Recent fundamental studies on the energy, chargeand heat transport provide the foundation for the rational design of NC-based materials and devices. At the same time, little is known about structure of the interfaces formed between different NC layers. For example, NC solar cells require stacked NC layers with n- and p-type conductivity for efficient separation of charge carriers. Performance of NC devices should depend on the perfection of homo- and heteroepitaxial interfaces formed between the NC layers, in a similar way as it occurs in traditional electronics and optoelectronics. In this work, we study the epitaxial growth of NCs arrays that revealed an exceptional strain tolerance. It followed a universal island size scaling behavior and showed a strain-driven transition from layer-by-layer to Stranski-Krastanov growth regime with non-trivial island height statistics. We found that kinetic bottlenecks played an important role in NC epitaxy, especially in the transition from sub-monolayer to multilayer coverage and the epitaxy of NCs with anisotropic shape.

"Soft� epitaxy at the nanoscale: The role of size, shape, and strain

247th National Meeting (2014)

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