Acceleration of Near-IR Emission through Efficient Surface Passivation in Cd(3)P(2) Quantum Dots

Fast near-IR (NIR) emitters are highly valuable in telecommunications and biological imaging. The most established NIR emitters are epitaxially grown In(x)Ga(1−x)As quantum dots (QDs), but epitaxial growth has several disadvantages. Colloidal synthesis is a viable alternative that produces a few NIR-emitting materials, but they suffer from long photoluminescence (PL) times. These long PL times are intrinsic in some NIR materials (PbS, PbSe) but are attributed to emission from bright trapped carrier states in others. We show that Cd(3)P(2) QDs possess substantial trap emission with radiative times >10(1) ns. Surface passivation through shell growth or coordination of Lewis acids is shown to accelerate the NIR emission from Cd(3)P(2) QDs by decreasing the amount of trap emission. This finding brings us one step closer to the application of colloidally synthesized QDs as quantum emitters.