A very eventful few weeks to lead into the new semester. We’ve been joined by a new postdoc Suman from Columbia University, who was just awarded one of the inaugural NSF/ASEE eFellows fellowships, in addition to his Kavli at Cornell fellowship. Great work! This week is also the last with Alessandra, our visiting PhD student from Milan. She’ll be missed! And to cap it off, Woojae successfully interviewed for a tenure-track position in Chemistry at Yonsei University – excellent work, an amazing achievement! All in all, good cause for a celebration at Bickering Twins and our first group photo.
DOE Early Career Award
Our proposal What is the matter within polaritons: Molecular control of collective hybrid states has just been awarded funding from the DOE. Time to celebrate! And then get down to some seriously hard work…
Graduation 2021
Congratulations to Stavrini on graduating from Cornell AEP! She leaves behind an amazing trove of data on MOF spectroscopy and will be missed as she moves on to bigger and better (and warmer and sunnier) things!
Ultrafast vibronic spectroscopy
Woojae’s review article has just been published on using ultrafast vibrational techniques to study vibronic mechanisms of singlet fission. You can find it here. Congratulations for his first paper with the group!
Welcome Alessandra and Thomas!
The group continues to grow! This month we welcomed Alessandra Ronchi, a visiting PhD student from the University of Milano-Bicocca, and Thomas Khazanov, a new C&CB recruit. We aim to really put the laser to work. Time to find some more office space…
Emissive TT states in pentacene
We’ve just published a new paper in Nature Chemistry demonstrating direct emission from bound TT states in single-crystalline pentacene. Very proud to have been a part of that team, and the lead author David did some phenomenal work with extremely difficult measurements! Worth a read over the holidays!
Let there be light!
After months of delays and with a big thanks to Woojae, we now have a fully operational Pharos, Orpheus + Lyra, and simultaneous 2H-3H Hiro. So many photons, in so many colours! Fortunately we know just what to do with them…
Polariton Chemistry seminar
Andrew just gave a seminar last week on our latest studies of the spectroscopy of exciton-polaritons, as part of the excellent Polariton Chemistry seminar series organized by Wei Xiong and Joel Yuen-Zhou of UCSD. The recording of Andrew’s talk and most other seminars in the series are available on the Polariton Chemistry youtube channel. Keep an eye out for the special cameo of Basil behaving badly!
Welcome to Woojae and Stavrini!
We’ve just been joined by a top-notch spectroscopist from Yonsei University, Dr. Woojae Kim! Also a belated welcome to our first physicist, Stavrini Tsangari, an undergraduate in the AEP program who joined us for the fall semester. They’ll both be putting their laser experience to good use to get us up and running.
Our first grant
A big thanks to the ACS Petroleum Research Fund, who has awarded us a grant to study complex photocatalysis within MOFs. Olefins, watch out!