The Musser Research Group

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…

We have a bumper crop of new recruits this summer. A big welcome to Gloria Davidova, Vivian Ding, Zahra Kelsey, Anthony Lara and Ryan Pinard, who signed up to join us for undergraduate research this summer (and a welcome back to Bea Pence for the same). This week we’re also joined by our newest postdoctoral researcher, Juno Kim from Yonsei University, who recently received a competitive South Korean national fellowship. Looking forward to working with you all this summer!

A big congratulations to Aaron, Trevor and Nicole on their graduation this weekend! It has been one heck of a ride these last few years, and you came through it very well. Special congratulations to Aaron for receiving the department’s George C Caldwell prize for all-round excellence during his undergraduate studies. And now it’s time for bigger and better things. We’ll look forward to seeing what you get up to in your graduate studies, with (so far) Nicole going to CU Boulder and Aaron to MIT!

Our paper on ultrafast coherent polariton transport has just been published in Advanced Science, as part of the Rising Stars collection! Another great outcome for our fruitful collaboration with Akshay Rao at Cambridge. Not only are we able to distinguish bright polaritons from incoherent dark states, we also reveal for the first time how long-range polariton transport must involve population interchange with the reservoir. Even simple cavities turn out to be very complex systems, but therein lie the most exciting opportunities. Check it out here!

We kicked off the new year with a publication in Advanced Science on symmetry-breaking emission and charge transfer in bibenzopentaphenes, the start of a new collaboration with Akimitsu Narita at OIST. And also Suman’s first foray into ultrafast spectroscopy – great work! Have a read here. The year also brings us some new faces in the lab. Welcome to undergraduate students Bea, Sean and Alex!

A big welcome to our new graduate students, Amy, Aleesha and Leo! The whole department had a bumper crop this year, and these three proved their excellent taste in scientific topic.

Big congratulations to Scott for publishing his first paper, out this week in J Chem Phys. We consider some of the many ways our favorite transient absorption techniques can go wrong with organic microcavities – check it out here! This also marks the group’s first paper from a Cornell grad student; hopefully the first of many! And a big, belated welcome to our two new undergraduate research students, Catherine and Sophia. both from C&CB. Great to have you on the team! Slowly we’ll fill the department with spectroscopists…