I have been taught that chlorophyll flouresces and emits heat when exposed to certain waveleghts of light.
my question is

when light strikes the electrons in a flourescent material, do the electrons break free from the atom/molecule they were originally bound to? is this what happens when a molecule is said to be excited?

"Fluorescence occurs when an orbital electron of a molecule, atom or nanostructure relaxes to its ground state by emitting a photon of light after being excited to a higher quantum state by some type of energy:^[13]"

 

Above from Wikipedia. Electrons are elevated but not free.

Visible light is typically absorbed by an electron that spreads over many atoms - the chemical bonds are called "conjugated dienes" as an approximation.This electron can have different shapes; it uses to take the most stable one but light can deform it to a less stable shape. In fluorescence, the electron soon regains its most stable shape and emits a photon (light) in the transition process, with a colour defined by the energy difference between both electron shapes.