Ultrafast Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NSOM) of Emerging Display Technology Media: Solid State Electronic Structure and Dynamics,

The main focus of our project is the further development and application of NSOM to studies of the local photophysical and photochemical properties of complex nanostructured materials. We are directly involved in the currently-rapid advance of NSOM methodologies and are especially interested in ultrafast time-resolved applications of NSOM. Our ultrafast NSOM currently allows for picosecond and in the near future, femtosecond time resolution to be obtained with nanometer-scale spatial resolution. In our experiments we are addressing questions pertaining to variations in excited state lifetimes, charge and energy transfer rates, and charge and energy transfer distances and directionality in highly nanostructured materials. These results are being employed along with static imaging and polarization-dependent imaging, as well as static spectroscopic measurements, to provide invaluable information on how nanoscale structural variations lead to variations in the important local photophysical and photochemical properties of numerous technologically-important, nanostructured samples. MM