Semiconductor rings fabricated by self-assembly of nanocrystals

Three types of nonlinear organization schemes for creating ringlike semiconductors have been elucidated with the self-assembly of nanocrystals in aqueous phase under one-pot conditions. The synthetic architecture is based on morphological controls of primary nanocrystals which possess an intrinsic hexagonal symmetry. As most semiconducting materials have similar hexagonal (or cubic) crystal symmetries, in principle, the self-assembling processes revealed in this work should be extendable to other semiconductor nanocrystals.