During the past decade semiconductors, metals, and magnetic materials, synthesized in form of nanoparticles (NPs), have attracted considerable attention due to their novel physical and chemical properties and their large potential for various industrial applications. Semiconductor nanomaterials are promising candidates as building blocks of future electronic, optoelectronic, and photonic devices [1]. Moreover, they can be widely employed in biological and medical applications [2]. NPs with tunable sizes and different shapes have been synthesized by the methods of colloidal chemistry [1,3]. Generally, colloidally synthesized NPs comprise a crystalline core surrounded with a layer of surfactant molecules. The surfactant molecules (also referred to as "stabilizing agents" and "ligands") bind to the NP surface immediately after its nucleation and prevent them from fast growth and coagulation. The shell of stabilizing agents attached to the NP surface also provides solubility of NPs in a desired solvent which is very important for processing NPs [4]. On the other hand, the surfactant molecules can significantly change the NPs properties. For example, they can block catalytic surface sites, leading to a dramatic decrease of the catalytic activity of transition metal NPs [5]. Insulating shells around semiconducting NPs lead to very low conductivities of NP films limiting the use of NPs in electronic devices and solar cells [6]. Typically, alkyl phosphines and phosphine oxides, long chain alkylamines, and carboxylic and phosphonic acids are used as stabilizing agents in NP synthesis. The attempts of complete removal of these molecules by heating the NP layers in vacuum were unsuccessful because of partial destruction and carbonization of surfactant molecules at high temperatures [7]. There are several reports on chemical removal of stabilizing agents, for example, by treating semiconducting NPs with sodium hydroxide8 or hydrazine [9]. These techniques, although improving the electronic properties of semiconducting NPs, do not allow complete removal of stabilizing agents and can only be applied to a limited range of materials and surfactants.We propose a new type of surfactants, namely, tetrazole derivatives which can be controllably removed from the NP surface. Tetrazoles are a peculiar class of heterocyclic compounds. The presence of four nitrogen atoms . Moreover, the tetrazole group is known as an important ligand in coordination chemistry. Its donor nitrogen atoms can bind to various metal ions leading to stable complexes with diverse coordination modes of the heteroring [11]. Here, we report the synthesis of CdS NPs capped with 1-R-5-thiotetrazoles using two different synthetic schemes: solution-phase (Scheme 1) and solventless single precursor approaches. In both synthetic procedures cadmium thiotetrazolates 1 were used as cadmium precursors and sources of surfactant.A typical solution-phase synthesis yielding CdS NPs capped with thiotetrazoles was carried out under nitrogen using standard Schlenk line technique. ...