Assembly Kinetics of Nanocrystals via Peptide Hybridization

The assembly kinetics of colloidal semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) on solid inorganic surfaces is of fundamental importance for implementation of their solid-state devices. Herein an inorganic binding peptide, silica binding QBP1, was utilized for the self-assembly of nanocrystal quantum dots on silica surface as a smart molecular linker. The QD binding kinetics was studied comparatively in three different cases: first, QD adsorption with no functionalization of substrate or QD surface; second, QD adsorption on QBP1-modified surface; and, finally, adsorption of QBP1-functionalized QD on silica surface. The surface modification of QDs with QBP1 enabled 79.3-fold enhancement in QD binding affinity, while modification of a silica surface with QBP1 led to only 3.3-fold enhancement. The fluorescence microscopy images also supported a coherent assembly with correspondingly increased binding affinity. Decoration of QDs with inorganic peptides was shown to increase the amount of surface bound QDs dramatically compared to the conventional methods. These results offer new opportunities for the assembly of QDs on solid surfaces for future device applications.