Guglielmo Lanzani graduated in Solid State Physics at the University of Milan, Italy in 1987 and received his PhD in Chemical Physics at the University of Genova in 1991. Starting 1993 he was researcher at the Istituto di Matematica e Fisica of the University of Sassari, Italy. Since 1999 he has been Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Fisica, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
His research activity is focused on the experimental investigation of carbon based -conjugated materials, with particular interest to elementary excitation dynamics in the ultrafast time domain. He has co-authored about 130 articles and several reviews in journals and book publications.

Die Entwicklung optischer Untersuchungsmethoden verläuft rasant, konstant werden neue Verfahren entdeckt oder neue Anwendungen für bekannte Verfahren eröffnet. Gerade im Bereich der nanostrukturierten Materialien sind sie oftmals die einzige Möglichkeit, die gewünschten Informationen zu erhalten.
Erstmals geben nun Autoren aus Nordamerika, Europa und Asien einen Überblick über die ganze Breite moderner optischer Methoden zur Untersuchung von verschiedener Nanomaterielien wie molekularen Halbleitern, Clustern, Quantenpunkten, Biomolekülen, Polymeren, Fullerenen oder photonischen Kristallen. Den Schwerpunkt bildet dabei die Vermittlung des Wissens, das für die erfolgreiche Anwendung eines Verfahrens notwendig ist.

1. Introduction
2. Optical microscopy and spectroscopy of single molecules
3. Optical Properties of single conjugated polymer chains: The case of polydiacetylenes
4. Morphology correlated photophysics in organic semiconductor thin films by confocal laser microscopy and spectroscopy
5. Spectroscopy of long lived photoexcitations in pi-conjugated systems
6. Charge transport in disordered organic semiconductors
7. Probing organic semiconductors with terahertz pulses
8. Strong exciton polaritons in anisotropic crystals: Macroscopic polarization and exciton properties
9. Sub 5 fs spectroscopy of polydiacetylene
10. Ultrafast optoelectronic probing of excited states in
low-dimensional carbon-based pi-conjugated materials