Colloid well-characterized monodispersed

Well-Characterized Monodisperse Polystrene Latexes as Model Colloids... 

However, there are a number of difficulties associated with the synthesis of colloidal semiconductor particles. The preparation of stable, monodispersed, well-characterized populations of nanosized, colloidal semiconductor particles is experimentally demanding and intellectually challenging. Small and uniform particles are needed to diminish non-productive electron-hole recombinations the mean distance by which the charge carriers need to diffuse to reach the particle surface from which they are released is necessarily reduced in small particles. Monodispersity is a requirement for the observation of many of the spectroscopic and electro-optical manifestations of size quantization in semiconductor particles. Small semiconductor particles are difficult to maintain in solution in the absence of stabilizers flocculations and Ostwald ripening... 

Monodisperse spherical colloids and most of the applications derived from these materials are still in an early stage of technical development. Many issues still need to be addressed before these materials can reach their potential in industrial applications. For example, the diversity of materials must be greatly expanded to include every major class of functional materials. At the moment, only silica and a few organic polymers (e.g., polystyrene and polymethylmethacrylate) can be prepared as truly monodispersed spherical colloids. These materials, unfortunately, do not exhibit any particularly interesting optical, nonlinear optical or electro-optical functionality. In this regard, it is necessary to develop new methods to either dope currently existing spherical colloids with functional components or to directly deal with the synthesis of other functional materials. Second, formation of complex crystal structures other than closely packed lattices has been met with limited success. As a major limitation to the self-assembly procedures described in this chapter, all of them seem to lack the ability to form 3D lattices with arbitrary structures. Recent demonstrations based on optical trapping method may provide a potential solution to this problem, albeit this approach seems to be too slow to be useful in practice.181-184 Third, the density of defects in the crystalline lattices of spherical colloids must be well-characterized and kept below... 

A. van Blaaderen and A. Vrij Synthesis and characterization of colloid dispersions of fluorescent, monodispersed silica spheres, Langmuir, 8 (1992) 2921-2931 J.D. Wells, L.K. Koopal, and A. de Keizer Monodisperse, nonporous, spherical silica particles, Colloids Surf. A Physicochem. Eng. Asp., 166 (2000) 171-176 Howard A. Ketelson, Robert Pelton, and Michael A. Brook Surface and colloidal properties of hydrosilane-modifledStOber silica. Colloids Surf. A Physicochem. Eng. Asp., 132 (1998) 229-239... 

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