Potential uses include biomedicine, security printing, and solar energy.
Around the world, a huge amount of research and development work is underway on carbon-containing, or organic, molecules that emit colored light after appropriate excitation. The display industry and the development of biomedical imaging techniques drives this work.
While precise color tuning in organic fluorescent dyes has typically involved mixing different molecules, ETH Zurich researchers have now developed an approach that can generate a broad palette of colors with chemical adjustments within the molecules themselves.
Yinyin Bao, a group leader in the group of professor Jean-Christophe Leroux, and his team of scientists turned to fluorescent organic polymers. You can think of these polymers as moving chains of varying lengths.