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
Jim published a News and Views article in Nature about recent breakthroughs in electrically pumping luminescence in lanthanide-based nanoparticles
The article, titled "Lanthanides go electric: promising light emitters used in LEDs," discusses recent results from the Liu and Rao groups.
Our demonstration of the first nonlinear metasurface made from 3R-stacked 2D semiconductors was published Nature Photonics
Congratulations to lead author Benson Peng on this paper, titled "3R-stacked transition metal dichalcogenide non-local metasurface for efficient second-harmonic generation," a collaboration with the groups of Michele Cotrufo, Milan Delor, Andrea Alu, and Chiara Trovatello. A press release summarizing the work can be found here.
Our paper showing efficient photon pair generation from periodically poled TMDs over microscopic length scales has now been published in Nature Photonics
Congratulations to lead author Dr. Chiara Trovatello on this exciting paper, titled "Quasi-phase-matched up- and down-conversion in periodically poled layered semiconductors" - a collaboration with the groups of Milan Delor, Dmitri Basov, Jiwoong Park, Philip Walther, Cory R Dean, Lee A Rozema, Andrea Marini, and Giulio Cerullo. A press release summarizing the work can be found here.