We have the pleasure to welcome a new phD student coming from India, Shahana Nizar. She completed her master degree from IISER Thiruvananthapuram in June 2020 with chemistry as major subject and physics as minor subject. During her master thesis, she has been working on the chiroptical properties of aggregates, under the supervision of Pr. George Thomas.
An interesting article written by Katrina Krämer just appeared in Chemistry World, about the control of chemical reactions via hybrid-light matter states. It summarizes, via the opinion of some actors of this research field like T.W. Ebbesen, J. Yuen-Zhou or Felipe Herrera, what is known already, what still needs to be understood and what could be the future of the field.
We have the pleasure to welcome two new postdoctoral researchers in our group :
Our latest manuscript has just been accepted for publication in ACS Nano. We are showing that it is possible to enhance both the conductivity and photoconductivity of a p-type semiconductor rr-P3HT that is ultra-strongly coupled to plasmonic modes. In addition, the photoconductivity shows a modified spectral response due to the formation of the hybrid polaritonic states.
Congratulations to all co-authors !
We are pleased to announce the phD defense of Yoseline Cabara-Rosales on Thursday, 9th of July, at 10am. Her work, entitled
Agir sur une sonde Brownienne : des forces optiques aux protocoles thermodynamiques optimaux (Acting on a brownian probe : from optical forces to optimal thermodynamical protocols)
has been performed under the supervision of Dr. Genet. Due to the sanitary situation, the defense will take place in the Salle de Conférence of ISIS with a limited number of people, making use of a videoconferencing system.
Our latest paper is online and open access in Angewandte Chemie. We explore and reveal the critical role of molecular symmetry in vibrational strong coupling (VSC) in the case of a charge-transfer (CT) complexation reaction. We show indeed that VSC induces large changes in the equilibrium constant of the mesitylene-I2 CT complex, which can be either enhanced or suppressed depending only on the symmetry of the
vibration coupled to the vacuum electromagnetic field.
Today is the official date for the reopening of University research labs and ISIS is starting slowly to wake up, with this week only a quarter of its overall staff. We hope this “unlockdown” will happen in a smooth and safe way.
Generally in our lab, we confine molecules in a cavity and observe what are the consequences of this confinement… but since four weeks, we are ourselves confined, as approximately half of the people on Earth. It will for sure have consequences, that are for now hard to predict. Hopefully they will be positive and will enhance the good side of human beings. As a beginning, we already discovered an interesting feature : even all confined in different cavities, we are still somehow coupled, and we proved it this morning by having our first virtual group meeting ! Thanks to all : keeping in touch is important nowadays and we enjoy this post to send our warmest thoughts to our collaborators around the world, take care !
Here is a nice picture of our (happy) postdoc and phD students team taken by Caroline Schneider during ISIS new year lunch, on January 20th. Last year it was under the snow but 2020 started somehow…warmer…
Daichi Okada, who already spent two months in our lab in the autumn of 2017, is back for another two months stay. He is currently working in Kyushu University, in the group of Pr Adachi where his research topics is laser applications of self-assembled organic micro-structures. If you wish to meet him, he is staying in room 105. Welcome back to him !
