Steady-state photoinduced absorption of CdSe/CdS octapod shaped nanocrystals

Colloidal branched nanocrystals have been attracting increasing attention due to evidence of an interesting relationship between their complex shape and charge carrier dynamics. Herein, continuous wave photoinduced absorption (CW PIA) measurements of CdSe/CdS octapod-shaped nanocrystals are reported. CW PIA spectra show strong bleaching due to the one-dimensional (1D) CdS pod states (480 nm) and the zero-dimensional (0D) CdSe core states (690 nm). The agreement with previously reported ultrafast pump-probe experiments indicates that this strong bleaching signal may be assigned to state filling. Additional bleaching features at 520 and 560 nm are characterized by a longer lifetime and are thus ascribed to defect states, localized at the pod-core interface of the octapod, showing that some of the initially photogenerated carriers get quickly trapped into these long-lived defect states. However, we remark that a relevant part of electrons remain untrapped: this opens up the opportunity to exploit octapod shaped nanocrystals in photovoltaics applications, as electron acceptor materials, considering that several efficient hole extracting materials are already available for the realization of a composite bulk heterojunction.