Ricerc@Sapienza

Realization of innovative fluorochromes is an essential requirement to push advances in bioimaging and diagnostics. Once endowed with desired optical properties, they have to be integrated into standard staining technologies for biological materials. There still exist different classes of dyes which show complementary qualities and drawbacks.
This project aims to develop a new family of fluorescent molecules for highly sensitive chemical and biological detection that merge the incomparable brightness of pi-conjugated polymers, in our case Violanthrone, to the narrow emission lines of lanthanide elements.
Transient Absorption measurements, performed in Femtoscopy Labs at Sapienza in Rome, will probe the main mechanisms that characterise the photophysics of such complexes, e.g. excimer formation and charge transfer. The study of ultrafast photoinduced dynamics and the determination of the characteristic timescale will allow to determine the best chemical functionalization to obtain the-state-of-the-art fluorescent dyes.