Synthesis of Black Phosphorene Quantum Dots from Red Phosphorus

Rebecca R C Shutt; Thrinathreddy Ramireddy; Evgenios Stylianidis; Camilla Di Mino; Rebecca A Ingle; Gabriel Ing; Ary A Wibowo; Hieu T Nguyen; Christopher A Howard; Alexey M Glushenkov; Andrew Stewart; Adam J Clancy

doi:10.1002/chem.202301232

Synthesis of Black Phosphorene Quantum Dots from Red Phosphorus

Chemistry. 2023 Oct 2;29(55):e202301232. doi: 10.1002/chem.202301232. Epub 2023 Sep 7.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
² Research School of Chemistry, The Australian National University, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia.
³ Battery Storage and Grid Integration Program, The Australian National University, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
⁵ School of Engineering, The Australian National University, Acton, ACT 2601, Australia.

Abstract

Black phosphorene quantum dots (BPQDs) are most commonly derived from high-cost black phosphorus, while previous syntheses from the low-cost red phosphorus (P_red ) allotrope are highly oxidised. Herein, we present an intrinsically scalable method to produce high quality BPQDs, by first ball-milling P_red to create nanocrystalline P_black and subsequent reductive etching using lithium electride solvated in liquid ammonia. The resultant ~25 nm BPQDs are crystalline with low oxygen content, and spontaneously soluble as individualized monolayers in tertiary amide solvents, as directly imaged by liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy. This new method presents a scalable route to producing quantities of high quality BPQDs for academic and industrial applications.

Keywords: BPQDs; LP-TEM; PQDs; liquid-phase TEM; phosphorene quantum dots.

Abstract

Grants and funding