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Updated: May 26, 2026

Measurements of Long-range Electronic Correlations During Femtosecond Diffraction Experiments Performed on Nanocrystals of Buckminsterfullerene
Published on: August 22, 2017
Exciton superposition states in CdSe nanocrystals measured using broadband two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy
Daniel B Turner1, Yasser Hassan, Gregory D Scholes
1Department of Chemistry and Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, University of Toronto, 80 Saint George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3H6 Canada.
Abstract:
Coherent superpositions among eigenstates are of interest in fields as diverse as photosynthesis and quantum computation. In this report, we used two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2D ES) to measure the decoherence time of a superposition of the two lowest-energy excitons in colloidal CdSe nanocrystals (cubic phase) in solution at room temperature. In the electron-hole representation, the quantum coherence is, remarkably, a twelve-particle correlation. By comparing the measured 2D ES to simulations, we also explored the effects of inhomogeneous broadening and examined the spectroscopic signatures of biexcitons.
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