Quantum-Confined Emission and Fluorescence Blinking of Individual Exciton Complexes in CdSe Nanowires

One-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures combine electron mobility in length direction with the possibility of tailoring the physical properties by confinement effects in radial direction. Here we show that thin CdSe quantum nanowires exhibit low-temperature fluorescence spectra with a specific universal structure of several sharp lines. The structure strongly resembles the pattern of bulk spectra but show a diameter-dependent shift due to confinement effects. Also the fluorescence shows a pronounced complex blinking behavior with very different blinking dynamics of different emission lines in one and the same spectrum. Time- and space-resolved optical spectroscopy are combined with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy of the very same quantum nanowires to establish a detailed structure–property relationship. Extensive numerical simulations strongly suggest that excitonic complexes involving donor and acceptor sites are the origin of the feature-rich spectra.