Colloidal nanocrystals for telecommunications. Complete coverage of the low-loss fiber windows by mercury telluride quantum dots

Optical fibers have revolutionized the telecommunications industry to such an extent that the network capacity available today was unthinkable 20 year s ago. Even so, with the advent of the datawave, and the exponential increa se of network traffic predicted to continue indefinitely, the generation of bandwidth remains a challenge. One of the major limitations to the impleme ntation of future high-capacity, ultra-broadband optical networks is the ex pansion of the fiber bandwidth beyond that available from the current state -of-the-art signal amplification device-the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (E DFA). Although there is currently a large effort to expand the flat-gain ba ndwidth of the EDFA, most of these efforts involve sophisticated engineerin g, exotic glass fibers, or multicomponent cascaded systems. In a radically different approach, we are attempting to use the unique properties of semic onductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots, as "designer atoms" in order to pro duce an ultra-broadband optical amplifier with complete coverage of the tel ecommunications wavelengths. In this paper we review the synthesis of thiol -stabilized mercury chalcogenide nanocrystals via an aqueous colloidal rout e, which demonstrate extremely intense photoluminescence all the way across the spectral region of interest, i.e., from 1000 to over 1700 nm.