To blink or not to blink—Academy Fellow delivers 2018 Lloyd Rees Lecture

Academy Fellow Professor Paul Mulvaney delivered the 2018 Lloyd Rees Lecture recently on Excitons in nanocrystals—to blink or not to blink.

Professor Mulvaney discussed some of the basic photophysics and chemistry of semiconductor nanocrystals. These materials have long been touted as building blocks for future optoelectronics, as components in third-generation solar cells, tunable LEDs and miniature lasers, and for single-molecule tracking especially in biological environments.

‘Blinking’ is the name given to the fluctuations in luminescence observed at the single quantum dot level, and to understand some of the core challenges it is necessary to understand blinking in detail. Professor Mulvaney discussed how this can be investigated and analysed, and how excitons in these materials can be manipulated by temperature, pressure, energy transfer and doping.

According to the lecture organiser, Academy Fellow Professor Peter Hannaford, Professor Mulvaney’s lecture was ‘brilliant’. The Academy’s Victorian Fellowship regional chair, Professor David Vaux, chaired the event, and Professor Mulvaney was thanked by Dr Danielle Kennedy from CSIRO Clayton.

More about the Lloyd Rees Lecture