Single-step synthesis of silver sulfide nanocrystals in arsenic trisulfide Juliana M. P. Almeida,1,2* Chao Lu,1 Cleber R. Mendonça2 and Craig B. Arnold1 1Dep. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA 2São Carlos Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo, PO Box 369, 13560-970, São Carlos, SP, Brazil * [email protected] Abstract: Silver sulfide nanocrystals and chalcogenide glasses (ChGs) are two distinct classes of semiconductor materials that have been exploited for new infrared technologies. Each one exhibits particular optoelectronic phenomena, which could be encompassed in a hybrid material. However, the integration of uniformly distributed crystalline phases within an amorphous matrix is not always an easy task. In this paper, we report a single step method to produce Ag2S nanocrystals (NCs) in arsenic trisulfide (As2S3) solution. 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Richardson, “Incorporation of luminescent CdSe/ZnS core-shell quantum dots and PbS quantum dots into solution-derived chalcogenide glass films,” Opt. Mater. Express 3(6), 729–738 (2013). 1. Introduction Semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) and quantum dots are of great interest for their use in a wide range of applications from optoelectronics to biological systems [1, 2]. In contrast to metallic nanoparticles that have a plasmon band in the visible or UV portion of the spectrum, semiconductor nanocrystals exhibit localized surface plasmon resonances in the infrared region [3, 4] making them promising for infrared metamaterials. Silver sulfide is a direct bandgap semiconductor (Eg ~1 eV), commonly used as a solid-state electrolyte, presenting both ionic and electronic conduction [5, 6]. On account of the quantum confinement effect #241289 Received 22 May 2015; revised 3 Jul 2015; accepted 13 Jul 2015; published 21 Jul 2015 © 2015 OSA 1 Aug 2015 | Vol. 5, No. 8 | DOI:10.1364/OME.5.001815 | OPTICAL MATERIALS EXPRESS 1816 when synthetized at the nanometer scale, indirect transitions have been observed in the range of 0.9 – 1.8 eV and direct transitions are blue shifted, to the range 2.7 – 4.0 eV [7]. Based on these transitions, new applications have been proposed for silver sulfide, such as, NIR emitters for in vivo imaging [8, 9], sensitizers for solar cells [10], and substrates for surface- enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) [11].