Discovery of a New Light-Molecule Interaction: Supracence Reveals What Is Missing in Fluorescence Imaging

The currently understood principles about light-molecule interactions are limited, and thus scientific scope beyond current theories is rarely harvested. Herein we demonstrate supracence phenomena, in which the emitted photons have more energy than the absorbed photons. The extra energy comes from couplings of the absorbed and emitted photon to molecular phonons, whose potentials are constantly exchanging with molecular quantum energy and the environment. Thus, supracence is a linear optical process rather than a nonlinear optical process, such as second harmonic generation. Because supracence results in cooled molecular phonons and thus cooled molecules, behavior opposite to that of hot fluorescing emitters is expected. This report reveals certain supracence principles while contrasting fluorescence with supracence in high-resolution imaging.