Abstract:
The electric current traversing the junction of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) may generate a local emission of light. During the last years, we have used this method to study the intrinsic luminescence properties of individual molecules. This work has progressed in two directions. On one side we have used the ability of the STM to manipulate matter with atomic-scale precision to form single-molecule light emitting devices whose color, intensity and bandwidth can be controlled with high precision [1,2,3]. On the other side, we used the STM to generate sub-molecularly resolved fluorescence maps of molecules separated from a metallic surface by a thin insulating layers. Combined with spectral selection and time-correlated measurements, this hyper-resolved fluorescence microscopy approach allowed us to scrutinize the vibronic structure of individual molecule [4], to characterize the photonics properties of charged species [5] and to track the motion of hydrogen atoms within free-based phthalocyanine molecules [6]. Together with other recent reports [7,8], this result constitutes an important step towards photonic measurements with atoms-scale resolution. [1] G. Reecht et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 047403 (2014) [2] M.C. Chong et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 036802 (2016) [3] M.C. Chong et al., Nanoletters 16, 6480 (2016) [4] B. Doppagne et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 127401 (2017) [5] B. Doppagne et al. Science, 361, 251 (2018) [6] B. Doppagne et al. unpublished [7] Y. Zhang et al. Nature 531, 623 (2016) [8] H. Imada et al., Nature 538, 36
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