Mid- and Long-wave infrared Colloidal Quantum Dot Optoelectronics

Optoelectronics – sensing and light emission – in the mid and long-wave infrared (MWIR/LWIR) carry a very large informational dataset of our environment and has created a huge impact on safety and security, quality control, environmental monitoring, imaging, just to name a few sectors.

To date, the available optoelectronic materials and technologies developed to serve this very important part of spectrum have been based on high cost and fragmented solutions, curtailing their introduction to a broad market use and unleash of their potential.

INFRADOT will address this challenge by developing groundbreaking, lowcost, highly efficient material and device platforms operating in this so far under-exploited part of spectrum.

In order to overcome the fundamental constraints arising from the bandgap of availablematerials, INFRADOT will lead to a paradigm shift in colloidal quantum dot (CQD) technology, by making a leap from - the so far used - interband transitions to intraband transitions. In order to make efficient use of intraband transitions in CQDs, INFRADOT will address several fundamental challenges.

It will: i) Make significant advances towards robust heavy doping schemes in CQDs, ii) Explore andcontrol the intraband relaxation pathways by surface and quantum-dot structure engineering at the atomic scale, iii) Shed new insights on charge transport in heavily-doped, electronically coupled CQD films.

Capitalizing on these advances and engineering the energetic potential landscape at the nanoscale in heterogeneous CQD and CQD-in-perovskite solids, INFRADOT will create new optoelectronic device architectures to harness efficiently intraband transitions for highly performant, low-cost photodetectors, light emitters and bolometers.

The advances made in this project will lead to a new disruptive technology for the MWIR/LWIR, as well as provide extremely important directions in other fields that utilize hot carriers, for catalysis and energy harvesting applications.