NIST Studies Why Quantum Dots Suffer from ‘Fluorescence Intermittency’

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working in collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory, have found that a particular species of quantum dots that weren't commonly thought to blink, do. Although the blinks are short — on the order of nanoseconds to milliseconds — even brief fluctuations can result in efficiency losses that could cause trouble for using quantum dots to generate photons that move information around inside a quantum computer or between nodes of a future high-security internet based on quantum telecommunications.