Colloidal Chemical Synthesis and Formation Kinetics of Uniformly Sized Nanocrystals of Metals.pdfVIP

Colloidal Chemical Synthesis and Formation Kinetics of Uniformly Sized Nanocrystals of Metals, Oxides, and Chalcogenides SOON GU KWON AND TAEGHWAN HYEON* National Creative Research Initiative Center for Oxide Nanocrystalline Materials and School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, Korea RECEIVED ON FEBRUARY 20, 2008 C O N S P E C T U S anocrystals exhibit interesting electrical, optical, mag- Nnetic, and chemical properties not achieved by their bulk counterparts. Consequently, to fully exploit the poten- tial of nanocrystals, the synthesis of nanocrystals must focus on producing materials with uniform size and shape. Top-down physical processes can produce large quanti- ties of nanocrystals, but controlling the size is difficult with these methods. On the other hand, colloidal chemical syn- thetic methods can produce uniform nanocrystals with a controlled particle size. In this Account, we present our synthesis of uniform nanocrystals of various shapes and materials, and we discuss the kinetics of nanocrystal formation. We employed four different synthetic approaches including thermal decomposition, nonhydrolytic sol-gel reactions, thermal reduction, and use of reactive chalcogen reagents. We synthesized uniform oxide nanocrystals via heat-up methods. This method involved slowly heat-up reac- tion mix