Nano-scale photophysical processes occurring within single conjugated polymer molecules revealed by super-resolution fluorescence microscopy

发生在光电子材料中的光物理过程在设计光电子器件中起着至关重要的作用。由于光物理过程一般发生在纳米到几十纳米的空间范围内，传统的光学显微镜技术无法分辨这些过程，因此不可能直接可视化光物理过程。在这项研究中，我们开发了一种新的荧光显微镜技术，它具有纳米级的空间分辨率。利用这项技术，我们可视化了纳米级激子在共轭聚合物分子中的迁移和定域。我们证明了激子可以沿着聚合物链迁移到70 nm，这比之前预期的距离要长得多。

Photophysical processes occurring within optoelectronic materials play a crucial role in designing optoelectronic devices. It has been impossible to visualize the photophysical processes directly since these processes generally occur in a spatial size of nanometers to tens of nanometer which cannot be resolved by conventional optical microscopy technique. In this study, we developed a new fluorescence microscopy technique which has a nanometer spatial resolution. Using the technique, we visualized nano-scale exciton migration and localization in conjugated polymer molecules. We demonstrated that the exciton can migrate along the polymer chains up to 70nm, which is much longer than previously expected distances.