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-ever realization of the photon avalanching process in nanoparticles was published as the cover article in Nature.
Congrats to lead author Changhwan Lee on this exciting paper, titled "Giant nonlinear optical responses from photon-avalanching nanoparticles" - a collaboration with the groups of Yung Doug Suh, Artur Bednarkiewicz, Bruce Cohen and Emory Chan . A press release summarizing the work can be found here, and a nice News & Views piece was also featured in Nature
Our new Nature Nanotechnology paper titled "Imaging strain-localized excitons in nanoscale bubbles of monolayer WSe2 at room temperature", is now online.
Congratulations to lead author Tom Darlington on this excellent discovery and study of extremely localized, tunable emitters in 2D quantum materials. The work, highlighting the exciton confining capabilities of nanowrinkle "doughnuts", was a collaboration with the groups of Nick Borys (Montana State University) and Franke Jahnke (University of Bremen), as well as those of Jeff Kysar, Abhay Pasupathy, and Jim Hone at Columbia. A press release summarizing the work can be found here.
Our new Nature Materials paper titled "Ultralow-threshold, continuous-wave upconverting lasing from subwavelength plasmons", a joint effort with Teri Odom's lab at Northwestern, is now online.
Congratulations to co-lead authors Angel Fernandez-Bravo and Danqing Wang on their nice work.