34 February 2009 Physics Today © 2009 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-0902-010-9
Imagine driving your car at night while its headlights
display an annoying blinking behavior, switching on and off
randomly.
To add to the nuisance, the blinking...
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34 February 2009 Physics Today © 2009 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-0902-010-9
Imagine driving your car at night while its headlights
display an annoying blinking behavior, switching on and off
randomly.
To add to the nuisance, the blinking has no definite
time scale.
In fact, although in most of your nightly journeys
your headlights display quite rapid blinking, rendering at
least some visibility, occasionally they remain off for almost
the entire journey.
Ridiculous and impractical as that behavior may seem,
such is the situation commonly encountered by nanoscientists: A wide variety of natural and artificial nanoscopic light
emitters, from fluorescent proteins to semiconductor nanostructures, display a blinking behavior like that described
above.
The emission (on) and no-emission (off) periods have
a duration that varies from less than a millisecond to several
minutes and more.
The probability of occurrence of the on
and off times is characterized by a power law, w
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