Optical absorption of CdSe quantum dots on electrodes with different morphology

We have studied the optical absorption of CdSe quantum dots (QDs) adsorbed on inverse opal TiO2 (IO-TiO2) and nanoparticulate TiO2 (NP-TiO2) electrodes using photoacoustic (PA) measurements. The CdSe QDs were grown directly on IO-TiO2 and NP-TiO2 electrodes by a successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) method with different numbers of cycles. The average diameter of the QDs was estimated by applying an effective mass approximation to the PA spectra. The increasing size of the QDs with increasing number of cycles was confirmed by a redshift in the optical absorption spectrum. The average diameter of the CdSe QDs on the IO-TiO2 electrodes was similar to that on the NP-TiO2 ones, indicating that growth is independent of morphology. However, there were more CdSe QDs on the NP-TiO2 electrodes than on the IO-TiO2 ones, indicating that there were different amounts of active sites on each type of electrode. In addition, the Urbach parameter of the exponential optical absorption tail was also estimated from the PA spectrum. The Urbach parameter of CdSe QDs on IO-TiO2 electrodes was higher than that on NP-TiO2 ones, indicating that CdSe QDs on IO-TiO2 electrodes are more disordered states than those on NP-TiO2 electrodes. The Urbach parameter decreases in both cases with the increase of SILAR cycles, and it tended to move toward a constant value.