title: NANOMATERIALS. A tunable library of substituted thiourea precursors to metal sulfide nanocrystals.
abstract: Controlling the size of colloidal nanocrystals is essential to optimizing their performance in optoelectronic devices, catalysis, and imaging applications. Traditional synthetic methods control size by terminating the growth, an approach that limits the reaction yield and causes batch-to-batch variability. Herein we report a library of thioureas whose substitution pattern tunes their conversion reactivity over more than five orders of magnitude and demonstrate that faster thiourea conversion kinetics increases the extent of crystal nucleation. Tunable kinetics thereby allows the nanocrystal concentration to be adjusted and a desired crystal size to be prepared at full conversion. Controlled precursor reactivity and quantitative conversion improve the batch-to-batch consistency of the final nanocrystal size at industrially relevant reaction scales.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Mark P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Hendricks
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Michael P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Campos
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Gregory T
authors.initials: GT
authors.lastname: Cleveland
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Ilan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Jen-La Plante
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA. jso2115@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Jonathan S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Owen