ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Chem.
Sec. Green and Sustainable Chemistry
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fchem.2025.1677906
This article is part of the Research TopicEmerging Materials and Structures for Future Renewable Energy Conversion and Large-scale Storage TechnologyView all 4 articles
Iodine-Complex Directed Synthesis of PbS Quantum Dots with Enhanced Electronic Coupling for NIR Photodetection
Provisionally accepted
- Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
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Lead sulfide (PbS) colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) are promising materials for near-infrared (NIR) photodetection. However, conventional synthetic approaches often rely on long-chain organic ligands that impede charge transfer, necessitating complex post-synthetic ligand exchanges. Here, we introduce an Iodine-Complex Directed Synthesis (ICDS) method that enables the direct synthesis of iodide-passivated PbS-I QDs in polar solvents, thereby bypassing traditional hot-injection routes and ligand exchange processes. The PbS-I QDs demonstrated a reduction in interparticle spacing and enhanced electronic coupling, attributable to the elimination of long-chain insulating ligands. Consequently, these PbS-I QDs exhibited a photoluminescence emission peak at 1060 nm, characterized by a distinct spectral profile indicative of efficient radiative recombination. To assess their practical applicability, the PbS-I QDs were applied in two distinct NIR photodetector architectures: sensitized photo field-effect transistors (photo-FETs) and photodiodes. The photo-FETs have demonstrated a specific detectivity of 1.63 × 1011 Jones with rise and decay times recorded at 46.2 ms and 46.3 ms, respectively. In contrast, the photodiodes displayed superior response times, characterized by rise and decay times of 10 μs and 15 μs, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ICDS method in producing high-quality QDs and its potential for enabling high-speed, low-noise NIR photodetectors.
Keywords: PbS QDs, Iodine-Complex Directed Synthesis, QDs Coupling, Photo-FETs, Photodiodes
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 He, Qian, Zhang, Yin and Que. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xingtian Yin, xt_yin@mail.xjtu.edu.cn
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