| Abstract: | Depolarization of fluorescence resulting from the transport of electronic excitations in chromophore-containing polymers is investigated as a technique for detecting deviations from ideal-chain statistics. An approximate expression for the fluorescence anisotropy that depends only on the pair correlation function of chromophore labels is presented. This approximation is shown to be accurate for particular cases of long-range correlations, short-range correlations, and no correlations among chromophore positions. The formalism allows fluorescence depolarization experiments to be used as a probe of macromolecular pair correlation functions. |
