Optical properties of nanocrystalline silver halides

A review of quantum confinement effects in nanocrystals of silver bromide (AgBr) and silver iodide (AgI) is presented. AgBr is an indirect gap semiconductor while AgI has a direct band-to-band lowest energy transition. An examination of the low-temperature optical properties of quantum confined AgBr grown using a variety of synthetic techniques will be made. The dynamics of some of the involved excitonic processes will be measured and discussed in reference to a possible breakdown in the momentum selection rules as the nanocrystals are made smaller. Other explanations for this behavior such as impurity exclusion and surface effects will also be considered, as will the dynamics associated with the trapping of excitons at intrinsic iodide impurities in AgBr. Absorption measurements on AgI nanocrystals will be discussed and compared with the exciton photophysics in AgBr. Both AgBr and AgI display an increasing blue shift of their luminescence, arising from the recombination of excitons, as the crystallite size decreases. The luminescence intensity arising from this process increases with decreasing size in AgBr but it disappears in small crystals of AgI. This leads to the conclusion that in the latter material nonradiative decay channels are opening up as the size decreases.