Hybrid solar cells composed of conjugated polymers (CPs) and semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) have been considered as a promising alternative to inorganic solar cells due to the complementary advantages of CPs and NCs, such as flexibility in CPs and high electron mobility in NCs. In this context, several approaches were introduced to prepared CP-NC nanocomposites; 1) NCs have been synthesized in the presence of CPs to completely remove insulating fatty ligands. 2) CPs have been tethered onto the surface of NCs, achieving a uniform dispersion of NCs, thus promoting the electronic interaction between these two semiconductors. However, in case of in-situ growth technique dangling bonds of incompletely coordinated ions such as Cd2+ and Se2- act as charge trapping sites. When NCs are prepared with bifunctional ligands to graft CPs onto the surface of NCs, using of small amount of insulating fatty ligands was unavoidable. Both strategies mentioned above thereby, limit charge transport.Here, we explore novel synthesis strategy for poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) grafted cadmium selenide (CdSe) NCs (i.e., P3HT-CdSe NC nanocomposites) based on cadmium-P3HT complexes to circumvent problems mentioned above. We synthesized P3HT-CdSe NC nanocomposites via a hot injection method utilizing cadmium-P3HT complex as precursor. Cadmium P3HT complexes were prepared by grafting ethynyl-terminated P3HT with azide-functionalized cadmium complexes synthesized by decomposing of cadmium oxide with bifunctional aryl phosphonic acid. The morphology of CdSe NCs was controlled by changing the concentration of cadmium precursors. The intimate contact between CdSe NC and P3HT enables the effective dispersion of CdSe NCs in nanocomposites and facilitated theirs electronic interaction. The shape of nanocomposites was explored by transmission electron microscope. The success of grafting reaction was confirmed by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The efficient charge transfer from CPs to NCs was confirmed by UV-vis and photoluminescence spectroscopies.

Semiconducting organic-inorganic nanocomposites crafted based on cadmium-conjugated complexes

247th National Meeting (2014)

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