Emerging functional materials exhibit “liquid-like” dynamics associated with their soft lattice structures, often with spatial heterogeneity at length scales ranging from tens to hundreds of nanometers. Yet, tools to characterize such dynamical disorder have not been established. While nonlinear infrared spectroscopy has elucidated dynamics of liquids and solutions over the past decades, the limited sensitivity and the fundamental diffraction limit have hampered its applications to material systems at the nanoscale.
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