December 2021
Elizabeth, Hasini, and Destiny join the MSDL! We look forward to working with you all!
December 2021
Sydney defends her thesis successfully!
Congrats, Adedayo and good luck at Argonne!!! Thank you for all your hard work!!!
November 2021
Adedayo defends his thesis successfully!
Congrats, Adedayo and good luck at Gilead!!! Thank you for all your hard work!!!
July 2021
Aaron will be leading a group of investigators studying the quantum entanglement between cavity photons and molecular electrons through a 3-year grant from the US Department of Energy! Let's couple these molecules together!!!
March 2020
Aaron was invited to present the group's findings on the changes in excited state molecular structure and dynamics caused by polariton formation at the 2020 March Meeting of the American Physical Society. The presentation he intended to give prior to meeting being canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak can be downloaded by clicking on the thumbnail to the right. BEWARE: with its audio, the file you'll download is 180 MB!
September 2019
Congratulations to Adedayo Sanni for winning the Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Competition at the 2019 Frontiers in Optics/APS Laser Science Conference. He also won a Incubic/Milton Chang Travel Grant to attend the meeting. Very well done Dayo!!!
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Check out the video OSA made of Dayo talking about his experience leading up to the meeting: https://www.osa.org/en-us/history/multimedia/ He's sharing the limelight with 3 Nobel Laureates!
June 2019
Congratulations to Sydney for passing her candidacy exam! Co-chair Prof. Zhenfei Liu and committee member Prof. Berny Schlegel join us for a pic!!!
May 2019
Congratulations to Adedayo for passing his candidacy exam! Looking forward to more great work in the next couple years!!!
Congratulations to Aleksandr for passing his candidacy exam! On to awesome cavity-polariton spectroscopy!!!
March 2019
We made cavity polaritons!!!!!!!!! Well done Alek and Sundeep. Special thanks to the staff at the Lurie Nanofab facility @ UMich for helping make the structures and AFOSR for supporting us!!! Time for spectroscopy!
Our first paper was accepted at The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters!!! Congrats to Adedayo and the rest of the group who worked so hard on getting it done. Also, thanks to Prof. Federico Rabuffetti of Wayne State and Prof. Leopoldo Suescun of Universidad de la República in Uruguay. Check out the paper info on our Publications link above.
October 2018
Aaron was selected to receive a Doctoral New Investigator Award from the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society to study the effects strong cavity-coupling conditions on non-Condon vibronic coupling mechanisms!!!
September 2018
Aaron was selected to receive a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study the structure of molecules under strong cavity-coupling conditions!!! Let the coherent Raman spectroscopy of molecular cavity polaritons begin!!!
February 2018
New Lab Equipment Arrives!!!
Horiba XploRA Plus Raman Microscope: Outfitted with two lasers (532 nm & 785 nm) this instrument can obtained wideband, high resolution Raman spectra of samples down to 2 micron spatial regions. With a Linkam stage, shown at left, we can characterize structural properties of emergent materials at temperatures between 78 K and 600 K.
Spectra Physics Solstice Ace Ultrafast Amplifier: This laser system emits 5.2 mJ pulses of 800 nm whose durations clock in at 35 fs. Coupled to a Light Conversion Topas and NirUVis, we can tune sub-50 fs pulses from 400 nm to over 2 microns in center wavelength. This tunability allows us to construct state-of-the-art coherent vibrational spectroscopic tools to answer pressing questions related to structure-property relationships in materials.
Newport THz Time Domain Spectrometer: We measure low frequency, collective excitations of emergent materials using THz radiation emitted by nitrogen under intense illumination with both 800 nm and 400 nm pulses. In conjunction with resonant and non-resonant pulses from our OPA system, we use THz radiation to probe how collective excitations of these materials change under highly non-equilibrium conditions, highlighting the importance of structural perturbations to material properties.