Detecting Short Voltage Pulses Using Single Quantum Dots Designed for Action Potential Sensing

Omri Bar-Elli^a, Dan Steinitz^a, Gaoling Yang^a, Ron Tenne^a, Anastasia Ludwig^b, Yung Kuo^c, Antoine Triller^c, Shimon Weiss^c^,^d, Dan Oron^a

^aDepartment of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Herzl Street, 234, Rehovot, Israel

^bLEcole Normale Superieure, Institute of Biologie (IBENS), Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL), CNRS UMR 8197, Inserm 1024, 46 rue d’Ulm, Paris 75005, France

^cDepartment of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Physiology, and California NanoSystems Institute, University of California Los Angeles, US, United States

^dInstitute of Nanotechnology and Advance Materials,Bar-Ilan university, Ramat-Gan, Ramat-Gan, 52900, Israel

Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS)
Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2018 (NFM18)

S3 Fundamental Processes in Semiconductor Nanocrystals

Torremolinos, Spain, 2018 October 22nd - 26th

Organizers: Tianquan Lian and Mischa Bonn

Oral, Omri Bar-Elli, presentation 007
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nfm.2018.007
Publication date: 6th July 2018

It was recently shown that single colloidal quantum dots (QDs) may exhibit large sensitivities to external electric fields in the form of a spectral shift of the emission wavelength. This opens the possibility of designing QDs’ based local electric field sensors, for example for neuronal membrane action potential (AP) sensing. One of the hurdles on the way to such a goal is fast detection. Typically, slow spectrometers are used to detect the spectral shifts however, AP sensing requires significantly faster detection rates of the order of a millisecond.

The underlying mechanism for the QDs’ response to external electric fields is the quantum confined Stark effect. From symmetry considerations spherical QDs exhibit only a red-shifted emission spectrum in the presence of an electric field. APs consist of a change from negative to positive potential thus, symmetric QDs are of limited value. Asymmetric type II ZnSe/CdS nanorods, on the other hand, exhibit a large linear response, namely both red- and blue-shifts, depending on the orientation of the QD in the electric field. Moreover, the spectral shifts are expected to be correlated with changes in the decay rates.

Here, we demonstrate an experimental setup designed at achieving shot-noise limited sensitivity to emission spectral shifts on time scale suitable for AP sensing. We present experimental results of these phenomena as well as characterize the performance of single QDs as sensors for short millisecond voltage pulses comparable to APs in both duration and amplitude.

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