Redefining near-unity luminescence in quantum dots with photothermal threshold quantum yield

Superefficient light emission A challenge to improving synthesis methods for superefficient light-emitting semiconductor nanoparticles is that current analytical methods cannot measure efficiencies above 99%. Hanifi et al. used photothermal deflection spectroscopy to measure very small nonradiative decay components in quantum dot photoluminescence. The method allowed them to tune the synthesis of CdSe/CdS quantum dots so that the external luminescent efficiencies exceeded 99.5%. This is important for applications that require an absolute minimum amount of photon energy to be lost as heat, such as photovoltaic luminescent concentrators. Science , this issue p. 1199