Multiple time scale blinking in InAs quantum dot single-photon sources. M. Davanço, C. S. Hellberg, S. Ates, A. Badolato and K. Srinivasan in Phys. Rev. B 89:161303 (2014).

Studies blinking in InAs/GaAs QDs (family of dots where blinking—that is otherwise ubiquitous—was not much studied).

The model is based on multilevel rate-equations but, in addition to many "shelving" states (dark states), it also has some structure for the emitter. The details are in the supplementary material.

As these devices do not exhibit pronounced fluorescence variations, we use photon correlation measure- ments [18] as a more informative approach to investigate blinking over time scales ranging from tens of nanoseconds to hundreds of milliseconds

Photon bunching in these systems arises from shelving of the molecule into dark triplet states, resulting in bursts of emitted photons followed by dark intervals at characteristic rates.

Multiple shoulders in the autocorrelation have been associated with coupling to a number of TLSs with varying switching rates.

A first estimate of the number of dark states used in the model is the number of shoulders in the measured g (2) (τ ) data