General Lab Information

Ultrafast and Single Nanostructure Optical Microscopy Group

Our group researches light-matter interactions in low dimensional semiconductor nanomaterials and related hybrid and heterostructures, interfacial phenomena like charge and energy transfer. We believe these nanomaterials have tremendous potential in the development of next generation solar cells, solid state lightning, nanophotonic and quantum material based devices. We investigate atomically thin 2D van Der Waals materials, colloidal quantum dots, metal nanoparticles and nanostructures, conductive polymers and biological systems such as natural light harvesting antennaes. We often develop self-assembly methods to construct nanohybrids in search of emerging optoelectronic properties and improved optoelectronic performance.

We use ultrafast pump-probe, linear and nonlinear microscopy/spectroscopy to investigate the performance of these nanomaterial hybrids. Past and current research is described here and our most recent publications are listed here. Our group manages the Advanced Optical Facility of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials which is a collection of state of the art ultrafast optical techniques, including pump-probe, linear and nonlinear based metohds for soft, hard and biological materials characterization, with some methods having single nanostructure/nanocrystal optical sensitivity.