Fig. 2: Surface of pristine hBN reveals interfacial molecular dynamics.
From: Liquid-activated quantum emission from pristine hexagonal boron nitride for nanofluidic sensing
a, Overlay of a super-resolved image from 5,000 frames showing hopping emitters in isopropanol as the linked trajectories, as well as trapped spots. b, Artist’s view of the correlated activation of neighbouring defects leading to the trajectories. c, Representative intensity traces from the same images, taken from 7 × 7 pixel bins around emitters (dashed yellow box in Fig. 1c) with 6 ms exposure time. The top right trace corresponds to a long defect activation. The top left trace corresponds to a short activation of the same defect, magnified in the bottom panel. d, Distribution of residence times on single defects and for the entire trajectories. The dotted lines are fits to a two-component exponential decay. e, Displacement probability density functions (PDF) of the trajectories after different lag times τ = 6 ms, 24 ms, 66 ms,142 ms. The dashed lines are fits to two-component Gaussians. f, Visualizing the evolution of the two modes of the Gaussian fit in e with increasing lag time. The central region, corresponding to the trapped state, remains of a constant width, whereas the tails, corresponding to hopping, enlarge with time. The solid line is a fit to a standard diffusion curve.
