The Musser Research Group

Big congratulations are in order for this fellowship season! Kiser has been awarded an NDSEG and NSF GRFP, while Pedro has been awarded a GRFP for his graduate work at Harvard and Gloria received an Honorable Mention for her GRFP application. Great work everyone, it was all very well deserved!

Big congratulations to Gloria for her great AEP honor’s thesis work, and we wish her the best on her research at ICFO! To kick off the semester we welcome two new undergraduate students, Guanzhong and Daniel from C&CB – looking forward to working with you!

 

And we had two exciting papers accepted over the break. Aleesha and Trevor’s study of the role of disorder in strong coupling and the (alleged) ultrastrong coupling regime was accepted in the Rising Stars collection of Advanced Optical Materials! Sometimes the simplest description isn’t the best, but we found it can nonetheless be straightforward to account for the significant impact of broadening on the states formed under strong coupling. Hopefully this tool will let us better understand the functional behavior of polaritons!

 

And David and Julia’s investigations of ultrafast quenching dynamics in [3]-cumulenes was accepted in Photochem and highlighted on the homepage. Now we can start to tackle the harder problem of what happens in the solid state!

A lot has happened this semester. First of all a big welcome to our newest PhD student, Yaejin Kim! She’ll be building on her background in spectroscopy from BNL to push forward our studies of ultrafast polariton transport.

The collaboration with the Milner group continues to bear fruit – the CORN-MOF1 paper on fluorescent intermediates in MOF preparation has been accepted at Chemistry of Materials. This paper includes some of the first spectroscopy data ever taken in our labs and was where David and Stavrini cut their teeth. A long time coming, but great work!

 

 

And with a somewhat faster turnaround, Juno has kicked off our collaboration with Qiuming Yu with a beautifully detailed look into polaron dynamics in perovskite quantum dots, just published in ACS Nano. It’s a wonderful example of how spectroscopy should be done!

And finally, our review article on organic exciton-polaritons has just come out at Chemical Physics Reviews. Have a look and learn a thing or two about the problems we face.

Big congratulations to Soham on his first paper in the group, recently accepted in JACS! Part of our long-standing collaboration with Satish Patil (IISc Bangalore), we studied how the full progression of intramolecular SF dynamics can be fine-tuned in pentacene dimers by changing the twist angle between rings within the bridge. Check it out! We’ve got a lot more where this came from…

And a lot of the team – David, Tom, Aleesha, and Suman – have just been carrying the flag for LMG at the Optical Probes conference in Italy. By all accounts, they did a great job. Congratulations, guys!

We are very excited to be starting up three new federally funded projects this Fall: an AFOSR MURI and polariton transport with Russ Holmes (U Minn) and Frank Spano (Temple), a DOE study of photocatalytic materials with Phill Milner, and an NSF project on polariton condensation. Time to get serious in the lab!

We’ve had a lot of great news this semester recognizing some of the team’s excellent work and exciting ideas.

• Suman Gunasekaran was awarded a prestigious Arnold O Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in chemical instrumentation – we look forward to working with him for a couple years yet!
• David Bain was awarded the department’s 2023 Howard Neal Wachter Memorial Prize for his outstanding academic and research performance.
• Amy Vonder Haar was awarded a 2023 TA award to recognize her excellent work as a teaching assistant in the department.
• And Ryan Pinard was chosen by the department for the 2023 Darryl H Wu Award for excellence in chemistry.

Congratulations to all of you for your very well-deserved recognition!

I’m very honoured to have been awarded one of the 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships in Chemistry. Check out Cornell’s press release here. It’s a great recognition for our work, and I couldn’t have done it without an amazing team of students and postdocs!

There were a lot of exciting developments this semester. We recruited two new graduate student members, Rana and Kiser – welcome! We’ll also be joined starting in January by a new undergraduate researcher, Pedro, our first Physics major. We received a new Global Hubs Partnership Grant to build links with Girish Lakhwani’s group at the University of Sydney as we work together to make new polariton-based optoelectronic devices. And at the very end, David’s first paper on MOF photophysics and Amy’s first paper on intramolecular charge-transfer dynamics were accepted at JACS and Chem Comm. Check them out on the publications page. Great work, and welcome to the spectroscopy club!

 

Woojae’s first singlet fission study in the group, on DPP aggregates, has just been published in Nature Communications. Congrats! Read it here. It turns out that the popular signatures of fission in these materials – long-lived features in the visible spectrum, clear triplets in tr-EPR – aren’t what they seem. In these and many other materials, you have to wade through a great deal of artefacts and confounding signatures to find the real evidence of singlet fission.

Scott’s paper last year on the optical artefacts that plague organic polariton spectroscopy has just been selected by the Journal of Chemical Physics for a Best Paper by an Emerging Investigator award! Congrats to the whole team! And this is only the beginning…