Spectral Diffusion and Blinking Timescales In Semiconductor Nanoplatelets

Colloidal Semiconductor Nanocrystals offer a potential path forward to lowering the bar for access to Quantum Emitters. While demonstrations of single photons from nanocrystals have existed for two decades, intermittent periods of low light emission ("blinking") and transient emission from multiple emissive states ("spectral diffusion") have limited the usefulness of these sources. One underlying clue to the mechanism causing these two phenomena is whether or not these two effects are related. While evidence for blinking at fast timescales (~10s of us) is observable with modern electronics, the emission spectra cannot easily be captured at those timescales due to the inherent limitations of building up spectra in spectrometers. We utilize the indistinguishability of subsequent photons to determine the timescale spectral diffusion occurs and find that blinking can happen independently of spectral diffusion on the ~10us timescale, only becoming correlated at the ~1s timescale.