July 15, 2004 — Semiconducting polymers that emit light of different colors for hours instead of minutes could have a bright future in the world of cryptography. What makes this possible is a technique developed by Mike Barnes of the lab's Chemical Sciences Division that produces uniformly oriented single polymer molecules in the (non-intuitive) z direction — "like nanoscopic antennas," Barnes said. These oriented nanostructures have fluorescence properties that are profoundly different than those of similar molecules isolated in conventional film processing techniques. One newly discovered property, which will be reported in an upcoming issue of Applied Physics Letters, is that these oriented polymer nanostructures are very efficient at emitting single photons. This property could be useful in photonic quantum information processing applications.