Various Sensor Applications Based on Conjugated Polymers

Due to their excellent optical and electrochemical properties, conjugated polymers have attracted much attention over the last two decades and employed to opto-electrical devices. In particular, conjugated polymers possess many attractive features that make them suitable for a variety of sensing task. For example, their delocalized electronic structures can be strongly modified by varying the surrounding environment, which significantly affected molecular energy level. In other word, conjugated polymers can detect and transduce the environmental information into a fluorescence signal. Conjugated polymers also display amplified quenching compared to small molecule counterparts. This amplified fluorescence quenching is attributed to the delocalization and migration of the excitons along the conjugated polymer backbones. Long backbones of conjugated polymer provide the transporting path for electron as a conduit, allowing that excitons migrate rapidly into quencher site along the backbone. This is often referred to as the molecular wire effect or antenna effect. Moreover, structures of conjugated polymers can be easily tailored to adjust solubility, absorption/emission properties, and regulation of electron/energy transfer. Based on this versatility, conjugated polymers have been utilized to many novel sensory platforms as a promising material. In this tutorial, I will highlight a variety of fluorescence sensors base on conjugated polymer and explain their sensory mechanism together with selected examples from reference literatures.