PeroSeminar | 23 May 2024

A striking puzzle was raised two decades years ago by the spectroscopic experiments on single colloidal quantum dots (QDs). Observing the fluorescence of a single QD under continuous light excitation one can see that the intensity of its emission fluctuates with time (blinks). Even more interesting, these fluctuations do not have characteristic time scale. It means that these fluctuations can be observed at milliseconds, seconds, and thousands of seconds, sometimes hours. The mystery lies precisely in what causes blinking over such a wide range of times in such a small object only a few nanometers in size. Despite the fact that researchers have been studying this phenomenon for more than 20 years and thousands of articles have been published on this topic, it cannot be said that we already have a final solution to this mystery.

We consider the properties of the QD blinking properties, the mechanisms and models of blinking suggested in the literature.