Abstract

Semiconducting polymers – long studied in the context of mesoscale organic optoelectronics – have many interesting properties that could potentially be quite useful in the area of nanoscale photonics and quantum information processing.[ 1] A wide variety of structural and electronic properties are accessible through different polymer structures, and many are amenable to convenient solution-phase processing. However, in conventional thin-film formats, the broad spectral widths and notorious photochemical instability are serious limitations to robust functionality in photonics applications. Moreover, there are well-known difficulties in controlling chain organization in these species that can often affect the photophysical properties of individual chains.[ 2] Specifically, there are long standing questions regarding the nature and number of the emissive site(s) within a single chain that can contain more than 100 possible local chromophores.[3] We show that oriented nanostructures from single-molecules of a semiconducting polymer act as single-quantum emitters. These results suggest the viability of these species in photonic quantum information processing applications and provide new insight into macromolecular photophysics of conducting polymers.

© 2004 Optical Society of America