Thermal doping by vacancy formation in copper sulfide nanocrystal arrays


  Yehonadav Bekenstein[1,2]  ,  Kathy Vinokurov [2]  ,  Shay Keren-Zur[1]  ,  Uri Banin[2]  ,  Oded Millo[1]  
[1] Racah Institute of Physics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel
[2] Institute of Chemistry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel

Doping semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) is a highly pursued challenge, providing another means, along with size and shape, for controlling their electronic properties. We present a new, impurity free, method for NC doping by thermal treatment at moderate temperatures of under 400K, thus creating vacancies leading to free charge carriers. This method is applied here for Cu2S NCs, where Cu vacancies easily form due to the low chemical potential of Cu(0), resulting in p-type doping.  This thermal doping procedure is used here to controllably increase the conductance of Cu2S-NC arrays, achieving up to 6 orders of magnitude enhancement, for which we extract the activation energy for Cu vacancy formation, ~1.6eV. The thermal doping effect manifests itself also in tunneling spectra by the emergence of in-gap states and a shift of the Fermi level towards the valance band, signifying p-type doping. In addition we demonstrated local thermal doping of the NC film via a focused laser beam, serving as the heating source, which enables fabrication of advanced NC devices.