A novel chemical route for de
position of zinc selenide quantum dots in thin film form is develo
ped. The de
posited films are characterized with very high
purity in crystallogra
phic sense, and behave as ty
pical intrinsic semiconductors. Evolution of the average crystal size, lattice constant, lattice strain and the o
ptical
pro
perties of the films u
pon thermal treatment is followed and discussed. The band ga
p energy of as-de
posited ZnSe films is blue-shifted by
phs/BQ4.GIF>0.50eV with res
pect to the bulk value, while u
pon annealing treatment it converges to 2.58eV. Two discrete electronic states which originate from the bulk valence band are observed in the UV-VIS s
pectra of ZnSe 3D quantum dots de
posited in thin film form via allowed electronic transitions to the 1
S electronic state arising from the bulk conduction band—a
ppearing at 3.10 and 3.50eV. The s
plitting between these two states is a
pproximately equal to the s
pin–orbit s
plitting in the case of bulk ZnSe. The electronic transitions in the case of non-quantized annealed films are discussed in terms of the direct allowed band-to-band transitions with the s
pin–orbit s
plitting of the valence band of 0.40eV. The effective mass a
pproximation model (i.e., the Brus model) with the static relative dielectric constant of bulk ZnSe fails to
predict correctly the size de
pendence of the band ga
p energy, while only a slight im
provement is obtained when the hy
perbolic band model is a
pplied. However, when substantially smaller value for
?r (2.0 instead of 8.1) is used in the Brus model, an excellent agreement with the ex
perimental data is obtained, which su
pports some earlier indications that the quantum dots
?r value could be significantly smaller than the bulk material value. The ionization energy of a dee
p donor im
purity level calculated on the basis of the tem
perature de
pendence of the film resistivity is 0.82eV at 0K.