Pioneering method for the synthesis of lead sulfide (PbS) nanoparticles using a surfactant-free microemulsion scheme.

In this study, we report the synthesis of PbS particles having dimensions in the quantum-dot regime (13.17 to 26.91 nm) using a cyclohexane:isopropanol:dimethyl-sulfoxide surfactant-free microemulsion (CID-SFME) scheme without a capping agent. We found that with an increase in the microemulsion concentration and particle size, there was a simultaneous reduction in band gap due to the quantum confinement effect. Furthermore, a microemulsion concentration of 0.0125 M was the optimum microemulsion concentration for the growth of uniformly distributed, small particle-sized, ordered PbS nanoparticles using CID-SFME at a constant temperature and other effective parameters. From the results obtained in the present study, we believe that during the reaction, it was not the low values of viscosity and dielectric constant that were responsible for keeping PbS stabilized inside the core of the micelle of the CID microemulsion, but rather the van der Waals forces that also controlled the growth of spherical PbS. We fabricated a highly stable FTO/TiO

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.