Michel Orrit#

Research

My scientific field is the interaction of light with organic condensed matter. From 1979, I worked on surface excitons in molecular crystals with Ph. Kottis in Bordeaux. During a post-doctoral stay in Göttingen in 1985 with H. Kuhn and D. Möbius, I worked on Langmuir-Blodgett films doped with dyes. Back in Bordeaux, I used spectral hole-burning to study low-temperature dynamics and molecular orientation in ultrathin molecular films. With J. Bernard, I observed the fluorescence of immobilized single molecules for the first time in 1990. Since then, single-molecule fluorescence has developed quickly in several groups throughout the world, in particular towards room temperature from 1993. Since then, my group, first in Bordeaux, then in Leiden after 2001, has applied single-molecule spectroscopy to molecular photophysics, solid state dynamics, nonlinear optics, and to other single nano-objects, semiconductor nanocrystals and metal nanoparticles.