Welcome to
The Peteanu Group

About our group

Our group is interested in how bulk properties of materials emerge from interactions between the individual constituent molecular subunits (i.e. aggregation) and the local environment.  This understanding can then be used to design systems with optimal spectral and dynamical properties for light emission, energy transfer, and charge transport for a variety of applications including optoelectronic devices such as organic photovoltaics (OPVs) and organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). 

The primary tool we use is fluorescence microscopy which yields spectral and temporal information for molecules in solution and in thin films at concentrations ranging from single molecules to bulk.  We continue to benefit from numerous collaborations, both within CMU and beyond, with talented synthetic chemists who are designing exciting new materials.  Our current work focuses primarily on materials ranging from emissive conjugated oligomers and polymers to atomically precise nanoclusters with unique optical and magnetic properties.  We are also very interested in the effects of externally applied electric and magnetic fields on excited electronic states and we are pursuing a program to use plasmonic fields to enhance the stability of molecules in thin films.  The near-term goal is to enhance the resolution of fluorescence images by increasing the photon count per molecule.  Ultimately, this strategy may increase the useful lifetimes of molecules in the organic devices.