Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting19 (NFM19)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nfm.2019.290
Publication date: 18th July 2019
Copper chalcogenide nanomaterials have attracted significant research interest in due to their remarkable compositional and structural versatility, enabling them to support large densities of delocalized charge-carriers. Synthetic advancements in colloidal preparations of copper chalcogenides have allowed tunability of material properties such as copper vacancies, crystallographic phase, monodispersity, size, morphology, and hierarchical assembly. Deliberate targeting of structure and composition in copper chalcogenide nanomaterials is essential because it imparts control over their resulting optoelectronic and plasmonic properties that have use in a range of applications from sensing to therapeutics. Nanoscale copper phosphide remains relatively unexplored compared to its chalcogenide analogs due to a low degree of synthetic sophistication afforded by typical colloidal metal phosphide precursors, such as tri-n-octylphosphine and tris(trimethylsilyl)phosphine. Recent studies of colloidal indium phosphide nanocrystals have utilized an alternative aminophosphine precursor to direct syntheses that allow for a better mechanistic understanding. This design paradigm is extended in this work to Cu3−xP nanocrystals with the purpose of accessing tunability of their material and optical properties. A new high-quality, one-pot, heat-up strategy for making colloidally stable, plasmonic Cu3−xP nanoplatelets is presented. Size-tunability of the Cu3−xP nanoplatelets with maintenance of high monodispersity is achieved by careful tuning of heating profile and reagent composition. The use of molecular redox agents to modulate the localized surface plasmon resonance of nanoscale Cu3−xP is also explored.