Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

ENERGY TRANSFER

Three’s molecular company

Nature Chemistry volume 13, pages 726–728 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

Energy transfer from one molecule to another over a distance of nanometres is a fundamental process of widespread relevance. Now, scanning probe techniques have been used to include an intermediary third molecule and to watch how energy flows through it.

The transfer of energy, which is often equivalent to the transmission of information, is at the core of many biological functions and often underlies the operation of technical devices. The transfer process consists of a sequence of elementary steps acting cooperatively — sometimes within quite complicated systems — and one of these steps is the intermolecular transfer of excitation. In the simplest case, this could be transfer from one electronically or vibrationally excited donor molecule to an acceptor molecule in its ground state.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Fig. 1: Energy transfer between phthalocyanines.

References

  1. Cao, S. et al. Nat. Chem. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-021-00697-z (2021).

  2. Förster, T. Ann. Phys. 437, 55–75 (1948).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Kuhnke, K. et al. J. Chem. Phys. 99, 6114–6125 (1993).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Imada, H. et al. Nature 538, 364–367 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Zhang, Y. et al. Nature 531, 623–627 (2016).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Scholes, G. D. Faraday Discuss. 221, 265–280 (2020).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany

    Klaus Kuhnke

Authors
  1. Klaus Kuhnke
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Klaus Kuhnke.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Kuhnke, K. Three’s molecular company. Nat. Chem. 13, 726–728 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-021-00761-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-021-00761-8

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing