An eco-friendly way to see in the dark using colloidal quantum dots

Manufacturers of infrared cameras face a growing problem: The toxic heavy metals in today’s infrared detectors are increasingly banned under environmental regulations, forcing companies to choose between performance and compliance.

This regulatory pressure is slowing the broader adoption of infrared detectors across civilian applications, just as demand in fields like autonomous vehicles, medical imaging and national security is accelerating.

In a paper published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering reveal a potential solution that uses environmentally friendly quantum dots to detect infrared light without relying on mercury, lead, or other restricted materials.

The researchers use colloidal quantum dots, which upends the age-old, expensive, and tedious processing of infrared detectors. Traditional devices are fabricated through slow, ultra-precise methods that place atoms almost one by one across the pixels of a detector—much like assembling a puzzle piece by piece under a microscope.

Colloidal quantum dots are instead synthesized entirely in solution, more like brewing ink, and can be deposited using scalable coating techniques similar to those used in roll-to-roll manufacturing for packaging or newspapers. This shift from painstaking assembly to solution-based processing dramatically reduces manufacturing costs and opens the door to widespread commercial applications.

“The industry is facing a perfect storm where environmental regulations are tightening just as demand for infrared imaging is exploding,” said Ayaskanta Sahu, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) at NYU Tandon and the study’s senior author. “This creates real bottlenecks for companies trying to scale up production of thermal imaging systems.”

Another challenge the researchers addressed was making the quantum dot ink conductive enough to relay signals from incoming light. They achieved this using a technique called solution-phase ligand exchange, which tailors the quantum dot surface chemistry to enhance performance in electronic devices. Unlike traditional fabrication methods that often leave cracked or uneven films, this solution-based process yields smooth, uniform coatings in a single step—ideal for scalable manufacturing.

The resulting devices show remarkable performance: they respond to infrared light on the microsecond timescale—for comparison, the human eye blinks at speeds hundreds of times slower—and they can detect signals as faint as a nanowatt of light.

“What excites me is that we can take a material long considered too difficult for real devices and engineer it to be more competitive,” said graduate researcher Shlok J. Paul, lead author on the study. “With more time, this material has the potential to shine deeper in the infrared spectrum where few materials exist for such tasks.”

This work adds to earlier research from the same lead researchers that developed new transparent electrodes using silver nanowires. Those electrodes remain highly transparent to infrared light while efficiently collecting electrical signals, addressing one component of the infrared camera system.

Combined with their earlier transparent electrode work, these developments address both major components of infrared imaging systems. The quantum dots provide environmentally compliant sensing capability, while the transparent electrodes handle signal collection and processing.

This combination addresses challenges in large-area infrared imaging arrays, which require high-performance detection across wide areas and signal readout from millions of individual detector pixels. The transparent electrodes allow light to reach the quantum dot detectors while providing electrical pathways for signal extraction.

“Every infrared camera in a Tesla or smartphone needs detectors that meet environmental standards while remaining cost-effective,” Sahu said. “Our approach could help make these technologies much more accessible.”

The performance still falls short of the best heavy-metal-based detectors in some measurements. However, the researchers expect continued advances in quantum dot synthesis and device engineering could reduce this gap.