About Us
We are a multidisciplinary research group. Our aim is to characterize, understand and control light-matter interactions, with a focus on sensing, engineering and exploiting novel quantum and optoelectronic properties emerging from nanostructures and interfaces. This offers unprecedented opportunities for developing innovative material and device functionalities that rely on dynamic, local manipulation of single photons and charge carriers. We gain our knowledge by correlating spatially-dependent physical properties (e.g. electronic structure, excitonic interactions) with chemical information (e.g. molecular composition, reaction rates and dynamics) and morphological structure (e.g. strain, phase).
This work is enabled by new sensing and spectroscopic methods that we are continuously developing. Our approaches are typically grounded in (nano)optical, scan-probe, and single-molecule imaging techniques, which provide unique access to behavior at relevant length and time scales in real environments encountered in energy and biological applications.
News
Our paper on the first realization of fully photoswitchable all-inorganic nanoparticles, demonstrating perfect photostability and NIR response, was published in Nature.
Congrats to lead author Changhwan Lee on this exciting paper, titled "Indefinite and bidirectional near-infrared nanocrystal photoswitching" - a collaboration with the groups of Yung Doug Suh, Bruce Cohen and Emory Chan . A press release summarizing the work can be found here.
The inaugural Gordon Research Conference on Upconverting Nanoparticles just wrapped up.
Jim had the privilege of organizing and chairing the exciting event that included a full week of talks and posters from leaders and rising stars in the field. Thanks to all who participated; it was a resounding success!