Softmatter Nanotechnology and Advanced Spectroscopy at LANL

Our current research focuses on the electronic and optical properties of semiconductor, quantum-confined nanoparticles and nanoscale assemblies built from them. Using colloidal chemical syntheses, such nanoparticles, or nanocrystal quantum dots (NQDs), can be prepared with sub-nanometer precision having sizes from 10 to 100 ?. NQDs can be viewed as ?quantum boxes? with precisely controlled dimensions and boundary conditions. They can be chemically manipulated like large molecules and can be coupled to each other or can be incorporated into different types of inorganic or organic matrices. The ease of manipulating both the dimensions of the individual particles as well as their arrangement in a complex interacting structure makes colloidal NQDs well-suited for studies of size/structure-dependent quantum-mechanical interactions and as ideal building blocks for nanoscale engineering.