Temperature Dependent Carrier Dynamics in Ga-Alloyed CdSe/ZnS Core-Shell Quantum Dots

In this work, temperature dependent transient absorption spectroscopy measurements are presented on gallium-alloyed CdSe/ZnS core-shell nanoparticles between 30 and 130 degrees C. To our knowledge, temperature dependent measurements in these systems have been reported only in a few papers, although all processes related to carrier recombination are affected by temperature. For these experiments, gallium-alloyed CdSe/ZnS QD samples were used with nominal doping percentages of 2.5%, 7.5%, 15%. The experimental results show that the transient absorption decay is faster for the pristine CdSe/ZnS samples than in the gallium-alloyed samples at all temperatures. It is assumed that Ga-alloying promotes the formation of trions in the samples by introducing occupied impurity levels within the bandgap of CdSe. The resulting Coulomb blockade will, in turn, prolong the hot-electron relaxation process. By variation of the temperature, the distribution of charge carriers in the different recombination channels can be altered to accelerate recombination in the Ga-alloyed samples at higher temperatures. These measurements demonstrated their usefulness for observing the redistribution of charge carriers among different relaxation pathways.