Electrospun light-emitting nanofibers as excitation source in microfluidic devices

Abstract

We introduce the integration of organic, polarised light-emitting electrospun nanofibers and lab-on-a-chip microchannel geometries. The alignment and spinning electric field leads to ordered mesoscopic active areas, up to many mm², which exhibit polarised light emission and are fully compatible with microlithographies and microfluidics. We utilise the nanofibers demonstrating the photo-excitation of flowing dye chromophores in microchannels. This leads to easy decoupling the excitation and sample emission by polarisation analysers, thus remarkably increasing the imaging signal to background noise ratio.