Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Life Sciences, Nanjing National Laboratory of Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University,
This review highlights the recent progresses on the synthesis of indium phosphide (InP) quantum dots (QDs). Due to their low toxicity without using heavy metallic elements, such as Cadmium and Lead, InP QDs with bright, stable and highly tunable visible to near-infrared photoluminescence hold great promises for applications in light-emitting devices, displays, photodetectors, and biomedical fluorescent imaging. Over the past three decades, numerous progresses have been made in developing and optimizing the strategies for the synthesis of high quality InP QDs with good fluorescent properties, which are comparable to II-VI and IV-VI group of QDs. This review focuses on the synthetic parameters; the composition control; the choice of surface ligand and the formation of core/shell structures. The last but not the least, we envision the problems and the prospects of the research trends for the synthesis of InP QDs.