Carrier Multiplication in a Single Semiconductor Nanocrystal

To confirm the existence of the carrier multiplication (CM) effect and estimate its generation efficiency of multiple excitons in semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs), it is imperative to completely exclude the false contribution of charged excitons from the measured CM signal. Here we place single CdSe NCs above an aluminum film and successfully resolve their UV-excited photoluminescence (PL) time trajectories where the true and false CM signals are contained in the blinking "on" and "off" levels, respectively. By analyzing the PL dynamics of the on-level photons, an average CM efficiency of ∼20.2% can be reliably estimated when the UV photon energy is ∼2.46 times the NC energy gap.