Electronic transport of N-type semiconductor nanocrystalline solids

A bottleneck limiting the widespread applications of semiconductor nanocrystalline solids on optoelectronic devices such as photovoltaic cells, light emitting devices and quantum dots lasers is their poor conductivity. In this thesis, we show that the conductivity of thin films of CdSe nanocrystals is increased by many orders of magnitude when n-doped either by potassium or electrochemistry. Around half-filling of the first electronic shell, a peak in the conductivity is observed indicating shell to shell transport. Introducing conjugated ligands between nanocrystals increases the conductivities to ∼10-2 S cm. NaOH treatment of the thin films leads to a large carrier mobility and a semiconductor nanocrystals field effect transistor is produced.; The temperature and electrical field dependent conductivity of n-type CdSe nanocrystal thin films is then investigated. The low field conductivity follows exp(-(T*/T)-1/2 ) and high field conductivity follows exp(-(E*/ E)-1/2). The complete behavior is very well described by the variable range hopping theory with a Coulomb gap.; Finally, n-type colloidal CdSe nanocrystalline solids show large positive magnetoresistance at low temperatures (0.3K--4K). We attempted to dope Manganese (II) ions in nanocrystals, which might show interesting negative magnetoresistance. However, they still show similar positive magnetoresistance probably due to the difficulty of Mn doping. At ∼0.3K the resistance is increased by ∼150% at 10 Tesla.