Synthesis of monodisperse CdSe nanocrystals directly open to air: Monomer reactivity tuned by the selenium ligand

Abstract Size-controlled CdSe nanocrystals with visible emissions have been synthesized directly open to air in a noncoordinating organic solvent. The as-synthesized CdSe nanocrystals, characterized by UV–vis spectroscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction, have narrow size distributions without any postsynthetic size-selective procedure. Further experimental results show that, by simply changing the amount of trioctylphosphine (the ligand of selenium source), the monomer reactivity can be easily tuned. Such tunable reactivity is much more dramatic than the one by altering the concentration of oleic acid (the ligand of cadmium precursor).