Dr Marcus Seidel finished his two years contract in our lab last week. He will now take a short break to take care of an important and demanding experiment, becoming a full-time father, before going for another position in Germany. We wish him and his family all the best for the future !
As each year since 10 years, Strasbourg Eurometropole and CADR67 are organizing a challenge to promote the use of bicycles to go to work, called Au boulot à vélo . At ISIS, we are also taking part under the banner of the University and CNRS. Remember : University and CNRS won in 2017 and 2018 (category public company of more than 500 employees) so why not one more time ! Here below some ISIS members who are bicycle-addicts.
Dr Jino George is now leading his group at IISER Mohali but still collaborating with the lab and we are pleased to announce that our paper, previously on ChemArXiv is now accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie. It reports the solvolysis of PNPA catalysed by vibrational strong coupling (VSC) under cooperative strong coupling effect between the reactant and the solvent molecules. More precisely, when the solvent and reactant have the same vibrational bands, but only the solvent is at a concentration high enough to be strongly coupled to the cavity mode, the reaction rate is increased by one order of magnitude at room temperature. These results offer an exciting perspective for the control of chemical reactivity under VSC regime.
We added two more papers in our publications page.
One is a recent review written by two groups of ISIS (ours and Thomas Hermans one), including also three researchers from United-Kingdom and Sweden. It deals with the mechanical separation of chiral objects, in particular at the colloidal scale and the way of achieving it by new methods.
The second presents the results of a collaboration, this time with theoreticians colleagues of the DYNO group at IPMCS and a mathematician from NYU Shangaï. It proposes to control the dynamics of a stochastic system from one thermal equilibrium to another, via some optimized protocols that are tested experimentally on a particle in an optical trap.
Stefano Azzini ended his postdoctoral position in our group last week. He left for the University of Trento, where he got a position of assistant professor in the Nanolab group of the Physics department. Grazie mille Stefano and all the best in the future !
Here below some souvenirs with him !
We are pleased to announce the creation of a new page called Resources where we will put information about experimental or numerical methods we are using in the lab on a regular basis. For now, you will find a tutorial video about how to build a liquid cell for infrared spectroscopy characterization of vibrational strong coupling, that you can also access by clicking on the picture here below. Thanks a lot to Anoop and Lucas, our film directors !
This week, we will have the pleasure to receive Pr. George Thomas from IISER Thiruvananthapuram for the second time. He will give a conference at ISIS on Wednesday, the 15th of May at 4.30pm, entitled
Coupling of Elementary Excitations : Drawing Parallels Between Excitons and Plasmons
that will take place in the salle de conférence of ISIS.
Our Science paper has been highlighted once again, this time on the website Phys.org There is also a news in french on the CNRS INC (Institut National de Chimie) website. We are happy to see the interest it is generating !
A new publication from Guido Pupillo‘s team, in collaboration with us, just appeared in the asap section of ACS Photonics. It shows that, intrinsic surface plasmon-phonon polaritons in a metallic crystal, resulting from hybridized plasmons-phonons modes coupled to photonic degrees of freedom, offer a unique opportunity to control the material properties of the crystal, without the use of an external resonator. More details in the publications page.
