New experiments by researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, have looked at the roles of dopants in the photoluminescence of electrically active quantum dot films for the first time and have revealed remarkably large effects never previously observed. Daniel Gamelin and colleagues have found that an “Auger process” involving Mn²⁺ dopants in the quantum dots is much more effective than that in undoped dots – a result that bodes wells for various device technologies, such as field-effect transistors or solar cells.

http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/45785