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The chemical versatility and rich phase behavior of tin phosphides has led to interest in their use for a wide range of applications including optoelectronics, thermoelectrics, and electrocatalysis. However, researchers have identified few viable routes to high-quality, phase-pure, and phase-controlled tin phosphides. An outstanding issue is the small library of phosphorus precursors available for synthesis of metal phosphides. We demonstrated that inexpensive, commercially available, and environmentally benign aminophosphines can generate various phases of colloidal tin phosphides. We manipulated solvent concentrations, precursor identities, and growth conditions to obtain Sn 3 P 4 , SnP, and Sn 4 P 3 nanocrystals. We performed a combination of X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy to determine the phase purity of our samples. X-ray absorption spectroscopy provided detailed analyses of the local structures of the tin phosphides. 

Abstract Colloidal quantum dot (CQD) based infrared (IR) photodetectors offer facile wavelength tunability in the IR and low‐cost fabrication. However, owing to their large surface areas, CQDs intrinsically have significant surface traps critically affecting the speed of CQD photodetectors, typically mediated through tedious surface passivation efforts. In this report, an alternative strategy involving coupling of near‐IR photoactive lead sulfide CQDs with a thermally evaporated amorphous selenium (a‐Se) hole transport layer is proposed. By separating the detector into a photon absorbing CQD region and a charge transport a‐Se region, the study takes advantage of the extremely low noise, predominantly hole‐only transport process in a‐Se. A high 3 dB bandwidth of 2.5 MHz and a competitive specific detectivity of 2.5 × 10¹¹Jones at room temperature are demonstrated at 980 nm. This report serves as a first demonstration of strong coupling between an IR active CQD absorber and a‐Se, which paves the path to obtain fast and highly photoresponsive IR photodetection in the future. 

Over the past decade, Ag 2 Se has attracted increasing attention due to its potentially excellent thermoelectric (TE) performance as an n-type semiconductor. It has been considered a promising alternative to Bi–Te alloys and other commonly used yet toxic and/or expensive TE materials. To optimize the TE performance of Ag 2 Se, recent research has focused on fabricating nanosized Ag 2 Se. However, synthesizing Ag 2 Se nanoparticles involves energy-intensive and time-consuming techniques with poor yield of final product. In this work, we report a low-cost, solution-processed approach that enables the formation of Ag 2 Se thin films from Cu 2−x Se template films via cation exchange at room temperature. Our simple two-step method involves fabricating Cu 2−x Se thin films by the thiol-amine dissolution of bulk Cu 2 Se, followed by soaking Cu 2−x Se films in AgNO 3 solution and annealing to form Ag 2 Se. We report an average power factor (PF) of 617 ± 82 μW m −1 K −2 and a corresponding ZT value of 0.35 at room temperature. We obtained a maximum PF of 825 μW m −1 K −2 and a ZT value of 0.46 at room temperature for our best-performing Ag 2 Se thin-film after soaking for 5 minutes. These high PFs have been achieved via full solution processing without hot-pressing.