Beyond quantum jumps: Blinking nanoscale light emitters

Abstract

On the nanoscale, almost all light sources blink. Surprisingly, such blinking occurs on time scales much larger than predicted by quantum mechanics and has statistics governed by nonergodicity.

Cooperation in neural systems: Bridging complexity and periodicity

“…If noise intensity is conveniently small, the time spent by one neuron to move from rest to the threshold potential remains close to T P of Eq. (4). Although this condition is ensured by setting σ < √ γ , making the mean time distance between two consecutive firings of the same neuron very close to T P , in the absence of cooperation periodicity is totally lost.…”

“…(5) is ψ(τ ) = G exp[−Gτ )]. In the non-Poisson case the correlation function ζ (t 2 )ζ (t 1 ) becomes nonstationary [4,41], and for this reason it is convenient to write it as ζ (t 2 )ζ (t 1 ) = ζ (τ,t a ), with τ ≡ t 2 − t 1 and t a = t 1 . It is expected that the decay of this correlation function becomes slower and slower with its age, namely upon increasing t a .…”

“…According to a widely shared theoretical interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from neurophysiology to sociology, from geophysics to economics, heavy tails and inverse power law distributions [2,3] are thought to be the signature of complexity. Of special interest are the scale-free distributions in time, for instance, the waiting time distributions of the "light on" and "light off" states of intermittent fluorescence in quantum dots [4][5][6][7], which has been proved [8,9] to be a renewal non-Poisson process. These scale-free waiting time distribution densities have the time-asymptotic form…”

Linear response at criticality

“…The physics of blinking quantum dots (BQDs) [1][2][3][4] has generated a big interest but it is still a not yet fully understood phenomenon [2]. Analysis of the luminescence fluctuations led to the discovery [5,6] that these fluctuations are non-Poisson renewal processes.…”

Scaling law of diffusivity generated by a noisy telegraph signal with fractal intermittency

“…There are several examples of complex systems displaying a fractal intermittent behavior: ecological systems [22], neural dynamics [23], blinking quantum dots [24,25,26], social dynamics [27], brain information processing [28,29,30,16,31,32,18,19,33,1,3,4], atmospheric turbulence [34,17,35,9], earthquakes [36], single particle tracking in cell biology [37], molecular biology [20].…”