Isolated hexaphenyl nanofibers as optical waveguides

Abstract
Laser-supported, dipole-assisted self-assembly results in blue-light guiding nanostructures, namely single-crystalline nanofibers of hexaphenyl molecules. The nanofibers are up to 1 mm long, extremely well-aligned to each other and their cross sections can be tuned to span the range from nonguiding to guiding single optical modes at λ=425.5 nm . An analytical theory for such organic waveguides can reproduce quantitatively the experimentally observed behavior. From the measured damping of propagating, vibrationally dressed excitons the imaginary part of the dielectric function of isolated nanoscaled organic aggregates is determined.