Doped Semiconductor

Doping on nanomaterials provides a flexible way to tune to the properties of the materials while maintaining their high surface areas.The electronic, optical, photochemical, photo-electrochemical, photocatalytic and photoexcited relaxation properties can be tuned towards the desired direction by adding different elements.The materials can be engineered towards specific applications through careful selection of the dopants.

Doping is a powerful and effective way to alter the electronic and optical properties of a semiconductor. Doping is essential in the semiconductor industry since most semiconductors including silicon are essentially insulators without doping at room temperature. The addition of dopant can introduce electronic and structural defects into the pristine nanomaterials that can be advantageous or deleterious.

Doping typically follows a Poisson distribution.The uniform doping is done either by growth or nucleation techniques by decoupling the doping and growth process. In nucleation doping reaction conditions are controlled in such a way along with judicious choice of reactants that a nucleus of dopant can be created and by shell growth of effectively confining the dopant to the center of particle.

Nano-materials have been recently investigated due to their novel properties that are acquired at the nanometer scale, properties which change with size or shape. Besides the elemental composition and physical structure, as in bulk material or traditional chemistry, the size of the material provides another variable for us to tune the property of material. Moreover, a few dopants in the material can make the properties more adjustable.

Dopant precursor substantially changes the reaction kinetics. Doped semiconductor nanomaterials are expected to play an important role in nanoelectronics and nanophotonic devices. Doping level of nanostructures will effects the properties and functionality of nanoparticles. Doped semiconductor nanomaterials constitute a unique and important class of nanomaterials with novel properties.