Real-space investigation on coherent intermolecular dipole-dipole coupling with sub-molecular resolved optical spectroscopy

Understanding intermolecular electronic energy transfer mechanism in a donor-acceptor system is important for engineering light harvesting in photosynthesis and photovoltaics. Extensive efforts have been made to investigate the intermolecular electronic energy transfer from the energy, and time domains. However, it is still unknown how different types of electronic energy transfer are manifested in real space, due to the diffraction limitation in conventional far-field optics. The scanning tunneling microscope induced luminescence (STML) technique can do nano-imaging beyond diffraction limit and allows to optically access each individual constituent of a donor–acceptor molecular system. In this talk, I shall present the real-space investigation on the electronic energy transfer in donor-acceptor systems with sub-nanometer resolved STML imaging technique.