Thursday,
October 1, 2009 - 4:00 P.M., NSH 184
An intriguing quest for the underlying mechanism of the long-correlated fluctuations of the single colloidal quantum dots emission intensity (blinking) seems to be approaching a successful end. As was discovered a decade ago, a single nanocrystal fluorescence trajectory shows an extremely wide spectrum of timescales from hundreds of microseconds to hours. Properties of blinking are found only weakly to depend on temperature, size and material of the dot, and the environment. Similar fluorescence intermittency behavior were observed later for single nanorods, nanowires, and even some organic molecules.
A multiple recombination center model suggested recently by our group gives for the first time a qualitative explanation of all experimental features of the phenomenon.