Acid-free sol-gel fabrication of glass thin films embedded with II-VI colloidal quantum dots

II-VI colloidal quantum dots (QDs) are ideal for optical sensors thanks to their high fluorescent brightness and good size uniformity. However, embedding colloidal QDs into a glass matrix with the standard sol-gel process leads to the QDs being damaged by the acid catalyst. Here, we report an acid-free sol-gel technique, which proves to be both simple and effective in fabricating silica glass thin films embedded with commercial II-VI colloidal QDs. Octadecylamine ligands are used as a bifunctional aid to not only stabilize the QDs in solution, but also assist the formation of the SiO2 gel. We demonstrate that high-quality QD-embedded glass thin films can be developed with this technique, and our fluorescent tests indicate that, except for a small blueshift in the emission spectrum, the QDs are very well preserved through the sol-gel process. This method offers a fast and low-cost path towards thin-film QD sensors with good mechanical and thermal stabilities, which are desirable for applications involving highly focused laser beams, such as ultrafast nanophotonics. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.