Quantum dot blinking: relevance to physical limits for nanoscale optoelectronic device

Abstract

In designing nanoscale optoelectronic devices based on a small number of active quantum dots, it is of interest to consider that semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots) are observed to blink “on” and “off”. The time probability distributions scale as an inverse power law for colloidal quantum dots and exponentially for self-assembled dots. Possible mechanisms that cause the inverse power law and exponential blinking statistics are discussed in the paper and the relevance to quantum-dot based system architectures is discussed.