Excitons, polarons, and laser action in poly(p-phenylene vinylene) films

We have used a multitude of linear and nonlinear cw optical spectroscopies to study the optical properties of water precursor poly(p-phenylene vinylene) (PPV) thin films. These spectroscopies include absorption, photoluminescence, photoinduced absorption and their respective optically detected magnetic resonance, and electroabsorption spectroscopy. We have studied singlet and triplet excitons, polarons, and laser action in PPV films. We found that the lowest-lying absorption band is excitonic in origin. It consists of two absorption components due to a bimodal distribution of the polymer chain conjugation lengths. Electroabsorption spectroscopy unambiguously shows the positions of the lowest-lying odd parity exciton 1Bu at 2.59 eV and two of the higher-lying even-parity excitons, namely, mAg at 3.4 eV and kAg at 3.7 eV. From these exciton energies we obtained a lower bound for the exciton binding energy in PPV, Eb(min)5E(mAg)2E(1Bu) 50.8 eV.