Is There Any Escape From Noise?

I’m thrilled to share that my inaugural first-author paper, “Quantifying Noise Effects in Optical Measures of Excited State Transport,” has been published in The Journal of Chemical Physics and has been selected as an Editor’s Pick! [A free-to-read preprint is available here.] This paper marks a significant milestone in my academic journey, and I couldn’t be more grateful to my research advisor, Erik M. Grumstrup, as well as my labmates and spouse for their kind and generous support.

In the course of my research, I painstakingly took optical measurements of excited state diffusion in perovskites and other semiconducting optoelectronic materials. I was often vexed by the question, “How much measurement noise is too much?” Finding little guidance in the literature, I set out to answer my question by running some two million simulations.

In this paper, we systematically assess how noise impacts the accuracy of excited state diffusion estimates obtained through optical methods. Our findings reveal that even moderate levels of experimental noise can have significant effects and, in extreme cases, even lead to systematic overestimation of diffusion coefficients.

By providing a comprehensive analysis and proposing experimental strategies to mitigate these effects, we hope to offer valuable guidelines for fellow researchers in the field.

The paper also accompanies the release of open-source software and an online web app that offer researchers easy ways to assess their diffusion measurements, calculate the contrast-to-noise ratio in their data, and determine whether the noise is acceptable for their specific parameters and research goals.

I invite you to read our paper, which I hope will help those interested in learning about the pivotal role of noise in optical measurements of excited state transport.