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Updated: May 31, 2026
Fabrication of Spherical and Worm-shaped Micellar Nanocrystals by Combining Electrospray, Self-assembly, and Solvent-based Structure Control
Published on: February 11, 2018
Shape and phase control of CdS nanocrystals using cationic surfactant in noninjection synthesis
Yu Zou1, Dongsheng Li, Deren Yang
1State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, People's Republic of China. mselds@zju.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Monodispersed CdS nanocrystals with controllable shape and phase have been successfully synthesized in this study by adding cationic surfactant in noninjection synthesis system. With the increase of the amount of cetyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC) added, the shape of the CdS nanocrystals changed from spherical to multi-armed, and the phase changed from zinc-blende to wurtzite. It was found that halide ion Cl- plays a key role in the transformation, and other halide ions such as Br- can also induce similar transformation. We proposed that the strong binding between Cd2+ and halide ions reduced the reactivity of the precursors, decreased the nuclei formed in the nucleation stage, and led to the high concentration of precursor in the growth stage, resulting in the increase of size and phase transformation of CdS nanocrystals. In addition, it was found that the multi-armed CdS nanocrystals lost quantum confinement effect because of the increase of the size with the increase of the concentration of CTAC.
