We had the pleasure to welcome Dr Kalaivanan Nagarajan, who was a postdoc in our lab from 2017 to 2022, for a few days this week. He naturally reinvested his office 108 shared with Dr Eloïse Devaux, as his name is still on the door, and gave us a nice talk entitled “Perturbing a Chemical Equilibrium through Vibrational Strong Coupling”, about the latest research that he is conducting in his group at TIFR (Tata Institute of Fudamental Research), Mumbai.
We had the pleasure to host the kick-off meeting of the ERC Synergy project UnMySt (Unravelling the mysteries of vibrational strong coupling) in Strasbourg last week, from May 20 to 22. It was the opportunity for the participants to meet and start to know each other, their skills and projects, and to define together the way we would like to handle the next meetings and the topics to target for the future. Thanks to all for the fruitful discussions !
It’s been 10 years today that the first post of this website was published. During those 10 years, a lot of people have been part of the lab, for an internship, a phD or a postdoctoral position. I tried not to forget anybody, at least those whose stayed for three months or more with us since May 2015. Thanks to all for you past and present contributions and happy birthday to the website !
We are delighted to welcome one more postdoctoral researcher, in collaboration with Pr Giulio Ragazzon’s group, Dr. Pradyut Roy, from West Bengal, India. Pradyut joins us after completing his integrated MS-PhD degree at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Chemistry from Garbeta College, affiliated with Vidyasagar University. His PhD work focused on investigating energy and charge transfer dynamics in the multicomponent donor–acceptor assemblies composed of environmentally friendly semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). At ISIS, he will now delve into the vibrational strong coupling (VSC) and its impact on the properties of materials and molecules. Welcome Pradyut !
Our newest member, José Lopes Roque arrived one week ago in Strasbourg. He was born and raised in Leiria (Portugal). He holds both a bachelor and a master degree in chemistry from the University of Coimbra (Portugal), oldest University in Portugal (1290) and one of the oldest in Europe. In 2020, he started a PhD in chemistry at the same institution, under the supervision of Pr Rui Fausto. His work focused on chemical reactivity driven by quantum tunneling, in particular for reactive intermediates trapped in cryogenic noble-gas matrices. He spent one year at the Justus-Liebig Giessen University (Germany) in the group of Pr Schreiner, as part of his PhD, and defended in February 2025. Welcome José !
We are delighted to announce, that after a few years of hard experimental work, our paper on the influence of strong coupling on the critical temperature of a superconductor has been eventually published, in a special issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics dealing with “Polaritonics for next generation materials”. And this is not an April fool despite its publication date, the first of April… This paper summarizes our attempts to modify the critical temperature of a superconductor, the Rb3C60, by using the cooperative coupling between one of its vibrational mode with a strong vibration of a polymer, and surface plasmons mode. Despite the numerous experimental issues due to the complexity of this system and of those measurements, we observed that for most of the samples we prepared, the Tc of the Rb3C60 was increasing from 30K to 45K. Our theorists colleagues have developed a simple model based on an enhancement of the electron-phonon coupling to explain those results. We thank all the collaborators who took part to the success of this project. Congratulations to all !
Source : The Journal of Chemical Physics
The team is really growing nowadays and our youngest member is now Hugo Le Doze, master 2 student in the specialty Physics of Quantum and Soft Condensed Matter (PhyQS). He will explore the secrets of stochastic thermodynamics and continue to set up an optical trap in vacuum, working in close relation with Antoine Tartar and Kaina Diniz. Welcome to him !
We have the pleasure to welcome a new postdoctoral researcher since two weeks, Malay Mahato. Malay is originated from Purulia, a district in West Bengal, India. He completed his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2023. His research was then focusing on understanding the charge transfer dynamics in a quantum dot-based donor-acceptor system using transient absorption techniques. Subsequently he moved to Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Bangalore, in the group of Dr Anoop Thomas, for a first postdoctoral position where he worked on polaritonic chemistry.
We will have another visitor from Tuesday 25 to Thursday 27, Dima Boriskovsky from Tel Aviv University. He will give a seminar on Wednesday, February 26th at 14:00 am at ISIS on the Esplanade campus, which you are all welcome to attend.
