Photoconductive polymers experimental techniques

In the first part of this chapter we review some basic concepts of photoconductivity which are followed by a renew of some experimental techniques and how these have been applied to characterize some of the well known polymeric systems such as poly(N-vinyl carbazole) (PVK) and the charge transfer complex of PVK and 2,4,7,trinitro-9-fluorenone (TNF). The second part of this chapter is a review of the extensive original and patent literature on a variety of photoconducting polymers. 

We studied photoexcitations in such polymers in a broad time interval from femtoseconds to milliseconds and spectral range from 0.1 to 2.4 eV. However, in this chapter we review only our continuous wave (cw) studies, where the photoexcitations are generated in quasisteady-state conditions. The main experimental technique described herein is photomodulation (PM), which gives information complementary to that obtained by photoluminescence (PL), which is limited to radiative processes, or photoconductivity (PC), which is sensitive to high mobility photocarriers. The PM method, in contrast, is sensitive to nonequilibrium excitations in all states. 

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