Events

Transforming materials with a little light

My group leverages light-matter interactions to interrogate and control material and molecular function. I will focus on our recent realization of wavelike, nearly lossless electronic transport in van der Waals semiconductors. These remarkable transport regimes arise from spontaneous hybridization of electronic particles with long-wavelength excitations, such as acoustic phonons to form two-dimensional acoustic polarons, and light to form polaritons. This hybridization protects electronic particles from scattering with lattice defects and vibrations, enabling macroscopic transport with minimal dissipation even at room temperature, far outpacing current gold standards of electronics. I will also discuss the prospect of hybridizing material excitations with carefully-tuned vacuum fields to realize ultrahigh-mobility, defect-tolerant semiconductors in technologically scalable device configurations using both inorganic and organic materials. In all cases, we develop ultrafast optical imaging capabilities to track energy flow with femtosecond resolution and few-nanometer precision, providing detailed measurements of transport dynamics and sensitivity to both static and dynamic disorder.

Read more about the Delor Research Group here