David A. Vanden Bout

davandenbout@mail.utexas.edu
Physical Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry
Associate Professor, Faculty
David A. Vanden Bout

Contact Information

Office
WEL 3.150B
Office Phone
232-2824
Fax
471-8696

Research Group

Vanden Bout Group

Education

BS, Chemistry, Duke University (1990);   PhD, Chemical Physics, University of Texas at Austin (1995); NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Minnesota (1995-97)

Awards

Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar (2000);   Research Corporation Research Innovation Award (1999);   Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award (1997);   Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (1999)

Spectroscopy/Microscopy of Heterogeneous Materials

Research in the Vanden Bout group is focused on spectroscopically probing condensed phase systems that are inherently heterogeneous in nature. The difficulty in studying these non-ideal heterogeneous materials is that they contain a wide variety of environments. Bulk spectroscopic methods average together multitudes of these different environments, thereby masking the source of particular features and complicating the interpretation of experimental results. Two recent experimental developments have made direct probing of heterogeneous systems possible: near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) and single molecule spectroscopy (SMS).

Our NSOM studies are devoted to investigating the electronic and optical properties of organic thin film materials. In these materials, it is critical to understand the role of various charge and energy carriers in the system. However, vapor-deposited and spin cast thin films have widely varied morphologies that strongly affect their properties. Our research is eliminating these problems by directly probing thin films with NSOM. A wide array of techniques can be used for imaging including transmission, fluorescence, polarization, and time-resolved spectroscopies. We are currently studying a number of materials including polyfluorene, sexi-thiophene, poly thiophene and others.

The second half of our work deals with dynamics near the glass transition in small molecule liquids and polymers. We are developing a microscopic picture of molecular motion near the glass transition by following individual probe molecules dissolved in a glass forming material. Our first experiments are probing highly dilute dye molecules in ortho-terphenyl. Future work will study dynamics in other heterogeneous systems including micelles, ultra-thin polymer films, and phase separated polymer films.

Representative Publications

  • Lynn Rozanski, Craig Cone, David Ostrowski, and David A. Vanden Bout  "Effect of Film Morphology on the Energy Transfer to Emissive Green Defects in Di-alkyl Polyfluorenes" Macromolecules 40 (2007): 4524-4529.

  • Catherine C. Kitts, David A. Vanden Bout  "The effect of solvent quality on the chain morphology in solutions of Poly(9,9'-dioctylfluorene)" Polymer 48 (2007): 2322-2330.

  • Chia-Yin J. Wei, Yeon Ho Kim, Richard Darst, Peter Rossky, and David A. Vanden Bout  "The origins of non-exponential decay in single molecule measurements of rotational dynamics" Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 (2005): 173001-173004.

  • Uwe H. F. Bunz, Joseph M. Imhof, Lynn J. Rozanski, Ruta K. Bly, Carlito G. Bangcuyo, and David A. Vanden Bout  "Photophysics of Poly[para-(2,5-didodecyl)phenyleneethynylene] in Thin Films" Macromolecules 38 (2005): 5892-5896.

  • Chun-Yaung Lu and David A. Vanden Bout  "Effect of finite trajectory length on the correlation function analysis of single molecule data" J. Chem. Phys. 125 (1999): 124701/1-124701/9.