ABSTRACT
At present, nanostructured materials, such as semiconductor quantum dots (QD) and QD-based organic-inorganic nanoassemblies with tunable morphology, have attracted exceptional interest because of their unique architectures, tailored physico-chemical properties, possessing their wide potential covering material science (Kovalenko et al., 2015 ; Gaponenko 2010 ; Nicolini, 201 0 ; Klimov, 2010 ; Schm itt et al., 2011 ), optoelectronics (Haghi et al., 2015 ; De Mello Donega, 2014 ; Rogers et al., 2014 ; Vajtai, 2013 ; Rogach, 2008 ; Gur et al., 2007 ; Liu et al., 2010 ; Wang et al., 2010 ; Hillhouse and Beard, 2009 ; Coe-Sullivan et al., 2003 ; Baldenebro-Lopez et al., 2013), sensorics (Frasco and Chaniotakis, 2009 ; Frasco et al., 2010 ; Jin
and Hildebrandt, 2012 ; Lemon et al., 2013 ; Hadar et al., 2015), biology and medicine (Klimov, 2010 ; He and Ma, 201 4 ; Vo-Dinh, 2003 ; Shatkin, 201 2 ; Mocatta et al., 2011 ; Mattoussi et al., 2012 ; Ji et al., 201 5 ; Knowles et al., 201 2 ; Liang et al., 2010 ; Moyano et al., 2012 ; Rakovich et al., 2010a ; Guo et al., 2015 ), etc. From the basic point of view, the science and technology of QDs and QDbased m aterials involve on every length scale, from the molecular to the macro, surface and interfacial phenomena that can be tuned by varying the surface and interfacial energy and by varying the specific chemical interactions and chemical groups populating such surfaces and interfaces (Bullen and Mulvaney, 2006 ; Kalyuzhny and Murray, 200 5 ; Knowles et al., 201 2 ; Munro et al., 2007 ; Ji et al., 2008 ; Koole et al., 200 8 ; Voznyy and Sargent, 2014). It is clear that surface-mediated processes dictate the pathways and efficiencies of several of the m ost interesting and potentially useful photophysical and photochemical phenomena observed for colloidal QDs.
