Increase of photoluminescence blinking frequency of 3C-SiC nanocrystals with excitation power

Super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging is dependent on the blinking frequency of fluorophores. Consequently, improvement of the photoluminescence (PL) blink frequency is important. This is achieved for 3C-SiC nanocrystals (NCs) by simply increasing the excitation power. Using an excitation of 488 nm with powers of 5 μW to 50 μW, individual 3C-SiC NC always exhibits PL blinking with a short on-state sojourn time (<0.1 s). A fast Fourier transform method is exploited to determine the PL switching frequency. It is found that the frequency of the bright state increases from 2 Hz to 20 Hz as the excitation power increases from 5 μW to 50 μW, which is explained by the Auger photonionization model.