Defocused Wide‐field Imaging Unravels Structural and Temporal Heterogeneity in Complex Systems

Today's miniature devices and biological systems share the fact that their dynamics and properties cannot be understood in terms of macroscopic concepts, but require a thorough understanding of the nanoscale structuring. This structuring is often very heterogeneous, both in time and in space, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advanced materials (Weinheim) 2009-03, Vol.21 (10‐11), p.1079-1090
Main Authors: Dedecker, Peter, Muls, Benoît, Deres, Ania, Uji‐i, Hiroshi, Hotta, Jun‐ichi, Sliwa, Michel, Soumillion, Jean‐Philippe, Müllen, Klaus, Enderlein, Jörg, Hofkens, Johan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chemical Sciences
Chromophores
Conjugated polymers
Defocused wide‐field imaging
Energy transfer
Fluorescence
Nanostructuring
or physical chemistry
Polyphenylene dendrimers
Single‐molecule imaging
Theoretical and
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Summary:Today's miniature devices and biological systems share the fact that their dynamics and properties cannot be understood in terms of macroscopic concepts, but require a thorough understanding of the nanoscale structuring. This structuring is often very heterogeneous, both in time and in space, and is difficult or impossible to resolve with traditional approaches. In this Progress Report, we will discuss how single‐molecule microscopy—and defocused wide‐field imaging in particular—can be used to shed light on these phenomena. Revealing heterogeneity in macromolecular systems such as polymer matrices is difficult to achieve using traditional methods, but is highly suited to single‐molecule imaging. In this Progress Report we discuss some approaches that can provide detailed information on the structure and dynamics of such systems. In particular, we focus on a recent technique, defocused wide‐field imaging, which provides the position and orientation of a single molecule, and how this can be applied to explore phenomena such as polymer dynamics, nanoscale structuring, and energy transfer.
ISSN:0935-9648
1521-4095
DOI:10.1002/adma.200801873