Group-III nitrides form an attractive class of materials with high chemical stability, large heat and electrical conductivities and variation of optical bandgaps. There are nevertheless few methods at the moment that allow the direct synthesis of high-quality, free-standing colloidal nitride nanomaterials. Of particular interest is the synthesis of indium nitride (InN) nanomaterials, a near-infrared bandgap material with one of the largest electron affinity of all known binary semiconductors (~ 6 eV). Most approaches to synthesize InN nanomaterials have so far relied on amide (NH2-) salts, resulting in very poor control over size distributions as a result of poor solubility of these salts in the high-boiling-point non-polar solvents that are typically used in colloidal nanomaterials syntheses. We describe here a new approach to synthesize indium nitride that yields colloidal InN nanorods that rely on fully soluble inorganic alkylamido precursors. These precursors are shown to simultaneously lead to the formation of reduced In(0) nanoparticles which subsequently serve as catalytic nuclei for the formation of highly crystalline colloidal InN nanorods through the well-known Solution-Liquid-Solid mechanism discovered by the Buhro group at Washington University - St. Louis about two decades ago. The optical, electrical, and chemical properties of these nitride nanoparticles will be discussed, as well as strategies to generalize this new synthetic scheme to other nitride systems.

Solution-liquid-solid (SLS) approach to colloidal nitride semiconductor nanomaterials

251st National Meeting (2016)

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