Abstract

Recent progress in chemical synthesis techniques has made it possible to prepare specifically tailored well-defined inorganic cage and channel structures on an Å-scale, so-called molecular sieves, with encapsulated chromophores [1]. The best-known of these inorganic crystals are zeolites which possess an aluminosilicate framework but many more classes of molecular sieves like e.g. metalloaluminates or aluminophosphates are available. The structural and dynamical properties of chromophores encaged in these porous solids are modified by the spatial restrictions enforced by the environment, see e.g. [2]. In this contribution we report about the application of the sensitive techniques of fluorescence line narrowing and spectral hole-burning to probe chromophore dynamics and interactions of the adsorbate with the lattice in these confined geometries.

© 1992 Optical Society of America