A group of Cornell University researchers is hoping to change the nature of communication and usher in a new era in electronics with its unique quantum dot solids, which are essentially crystals made out of crystals. The team has effectively created two-dimensional superstructures out of building blocks consisting of just one crystal, which are then synthesized into larger crystals and fused together to form the final product: atomically coherent square superlattices.
What's the difference between these new crystals and previous crystalline structures? Their atomic coherence. Crystals in the new quantum dot solids are not connected via a substance, they are directly connected to each other. The resulting structures possess electrical properties that are potentially superior to current semiconductor nanocrystals, and the team hopes that their application will benefit energy absorption and light emission in various fields.
"As far as level of perfection, in terms of making the building blocks and connecting them into these superstructures, that is probably as far as you can push it," Tobias Hanrath, who led the study, said in a press release.
The new study sees the team achieving the strong coupling of nanocrystals, creating energy bands that can be altered based on the crystals' makeup, opening up potential for new artificial materials with malleable electronic structures.
Despite the promise of the findings, further research needs to be conducted to bring these exciting laboratory results into the real world.
"I see this paper as sort of a challenge for other researchers to take this to another level," coauthor Kevin Whitham said. "This is as far as we know how to push it now, but if someone were to come up with some technology, some chemistry, to provide another leap forward, this is sort of challenging other people to say, 'How can we do this better?'"
Hanrath believes that their accomplishments can be viewed in two different ways: a glass half empty or a glass half full.
"It's the equivalent of saying, 'Now we've made a really large single-crystal wafer of silicon, and you can do good things with it,'" he said, referring to the 1950s discovery that changed the communications landscape. "That's the good part, but the potentially bad part of it is, we now have a better understanding that if you wanted to improve on our results, those challenges are going to be really, really difficult."
The findings were published in the Feb. 22 issue of Nature Materials.
