Direct spectroscopic observation of quantum jumps of a single molecule

Abstract

BOHR'S notion of quantum jumps between electronic states of an excited atom has now been demonstrated experimentally for single ions confined in radio-frequency traps and interacting with a driving laser field1–3. In these experiments the fluorescence of a strongly allowed transition was shown to cease abruptly when the ion jumped into a metastable state which was coupled to the common electronic ground state by a weak radiative transition. But attempts to monitor quantum jumps of single molecules have been hampered by the fact that the lifetime of the metastable triplet state was too short in relation to the photon detection rate. By using a system with favourable photophysical parameters—terrylene doped into p-terphenyl crystals4—we have now been able to observe directly quantum jumps between electronic states of single terrylene molecules. In contrast to single atoms, here the quantum jumps occur as non-radiative transitions between states of different multiplicity, and are manifested as interruptions of the fluorescence signal. These results demonstrate how single-molecule spectros-copy can reveal truly quantum-mechanical effects in large polyatomic molecules.