Impact of Uniform Facets on the Thermodynamics of Ligand Exchanges on Colloidal Quantum Dots

Nanocrystal surfaces play a critical role in dictating their physical and chemical properties. Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots, are generally synthesized with insulating aliphatic ligands, but these ligands can be post-synthetically exchanged with other molecular species for a variety of applications. While previous work has investigated the thermodynamics of ligand exchanges on quasi-spherical quantum dots through sensitive isothermal titration calorimetry and 1H NMR measurements, the influence of well-defined crystal facets on the propensity of these ligand exchanges is yet to be explored using these techniques. We studied the exchange of native cadmium carboxylate ligands for zinc chloride ligands on (111) faceted cadmium selenide tetrahedrons and (100) faceted cadmium selenide cubes. From these measurements, we find the unexpected result that the thermodynamics of this ligand exchange between these facets is nearly identical. Further, a modified Ising model was used to fit both the calorimetric and 1H NMR data to extract thermodynamic parameters for the exchange. These simulations suggest that the observed enthalpic differences can be mostly attributed to varying inter-ligand interactions on the (111) and (100) facets.