An All-Inorganic Colloidal Nanocrystal Flexible Polarizer.

Authors :: Zhang S
Shi W
Siegler TD
Gao X
Ge F
Korgel BA
He Y
Li S
Wang X
Source :: Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) [Angew Chem Int Ed Engl] 2019 Jun 24; Vol. 58 (26), pp. 8730-8735. Date of Electronic Publication: 2019 May 21.
Publication Year :: 2019
Abstract: Inorganic single crystals with anisotropic structures usually suffer from high brittleness and stiffness. Flexible polymers are used to replace inorganic crystals, but the hot-stretching-induced orientation process is tedious, and oriented molecular chains tend to revert to random coils during aging. To overcome these obstacles and using the similarities between sub-1 nm nanowires (NWs) and linear polymers, we successfully fabricated anisotropic, transparent, flexible, and stable (ATFS) NW films with great potential for optical applications through a wet-spinning method. The NW films show birefringence, and their birefractive index is higher than that of many polymers. They also showed polarized absorption of UV light and anisotropic scattering of visible light. The integrated films composed of NWs and quantum dots showed good fluorescence polarization. The tedious synthesis of quantum rods and fabrication of oriented polymer films can thus be avoided.<br /> (© 2019 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)