Structural investigations of surfaces and orientation-specific phenomena in nanocrystals and their assemblies

Studies of colloidal nanocrystals and their assemblies are presented. Two of these studies concern the atomic-level structural characterization of the surfaces, interfaces, and interiors present in II-VI semiconductor nanorods. The third study investigates the crystallographic arrangement of cobalt nanocrystals in self-assembled aggregates.; Crystallographically-aligned assemblies of colloidal CdSe nanorods are examined with linearly-polarized Se-EXAFS spectroscopy, which probes bonding along different directions in the nanorod. This orientation-specific probe is used, because it is expected that the presence of specific surfaces in a nanorod might cause bond relaxations specific to different crystallographic directions. Se-Se distances are found to be contracted along the long axis of the nanorod, while Cd-Se distances display no angular dependence, which is different from the bulk. Ab-initio density functional theory calculations upon CdSe nanowires indicate that relaxations on the rod surfaces cause these changes.; ZnS/CdS-CdSe core-shell nanorods are studied with Se, Zn, Cd, and S X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). It is hypothesized that there are two major factors influencing the core and shell structures of the nanorods: the large surface area-to-volume ratio, and epitaxial strain. The presence of the surface may induce bond rearrangements or relaxations to minimize surface energy, epitaxial strain might cause the core and shell lattices to contract or expand to minimize strain energy. A marked contraction of Zn-S bonds is observed in the core-shell nanorods, indicating that surface relaxations may dominate the structure of the nanorod (strain might otherwise drive the Zn-S lattice to accommodate the larger US or CdSe lattices via bond expansion). EXAFS and X-ray diffraction (XRD) indicate that Cd-Se bond relaxations might be anisotropic, an expected phenomenon for a rod-shaped nanocrystal.; Ordered self-assembled aggregates of cobalt nanocrystals are examined with transmission electron microscopy(TEM) and selected-area electron diffraction (SAED). SAED patterns from multilayered assemblies show that the nanocrystals have preferred crystallographic orientations. It is proposed that the nanocrystals are organized in a vortex-like or "loop-closing" arrangement, possibly due to magnetism. SAED and dark field imaging used to investigate this hypothesis are presented, along with the data analysis. The effects of magnetism and nanocrystal faceting are discussed.