Fluorescence spectroscopy in polymer science

Polymer science is an interdisciplinary field, combining chemistry, physics, and in some cases biology. Structure, morphology, and dynamical phenomena in natural and synthetic polymers can be addressed using fluorescence spectroscopy. The most attractive aspect of fluorescent reporters is that their fluorescence parameters can give information on the nanometer length scale with an exceptional sensitivity, which allows data acquisition with submicrometer spatial resolution and millisecond time resolution. The use of fluorescent reporter molecules is, in principle, an invasive technique. Because of the large size of polymer molecules, however, small fluorescent reporter molecules of a length scale of < 2 nm can be considered a small perturbation.
Because of the enormous importance of synthetic polymers in our technology-based societies, almost every conceivable experimental technique has been applied in this field, but most of these tend to address the sample on a macroscopic scale. This chapter gives illustrative examples of the power of molecular fluorescence for investigating several microscopic aspects of polymer science.