Grant: Idea to Innovation

Quantum dots (QDs) are poised to revolutionize medical diagnostics and treatments and have a substantial impact on a wide range of consumer products because of their tailorable size-dependent optical and chemical response. Unfortunately most commercially available QDs contain toxic metals (e.g., cadmium, lead, or indium) that severely limit their market reach. Silicon nanocrystals (SiNCs) are metal-free QDs that possess all of the favorable properties of their toxic metal containing counterparts with the added benefits of elemental abundance, biologically compatibility. Despite the obvious advantages of SiNCs there are few convenient scalable methods for their production and the limited examples of commercially available materials are of poor quality. This proposal requests funds to: i) optimize material production and properties (i.e., increase the scale of this preparative method, optimize functionalization methods to maximize compatibility of SiNCs with water/biological media, optimize and demonstrate the scope of surface exchange reactions, improve photoluminescence), demonstrate applications (i.e., MR imaging, luminescence imaging) while directly comparing SiNC performance with that of key competing technologies, and prepare application/specification documents that will facilitate commercialization.