Our colleague Sandeep Kulangara, who was here for a postdoctoral position for 2 years, left us one week ago to go back in India. We greatly appreciated his discreet and efficient presence in the team. He started again in his former position of assistant professor at Government Victoria College Palakkad.
Good luck to him !
Lucia Di Virgilio joined us last week and will stay in our lab for two months. She is a phD student at MPI Mainz, under the supervision of Pr Misha Bonn and part of the UHMob program. Lucia is originated from Basilicata region in Italy and did her master on cold atoms in Pisa, where she first discovered physics in cavities. Now she studies the transport properties of conductive molecular materials under strong coupling regime, thanks to Thz spectroscopy. If you want to meet her, she will be staying in room 106 of our lab. Welcome to her !
Gian-Lorenzo Paravicini-Bagliani, who was working with us as a postdoctoral researcher since two years, left the lab in December. He found a position in Zürich, in the research and development department of Sensirion, which is a young company developing and producing a range of innovative digital environmental sensors for different industries. We wish him good luck in this new job !
Our best wishes for the new year to our friends, our present and past collaborators around the world and to the visitors of this website ! Let’s hope 2022 will be as peaceful and beautiful as this alsatian landscape under the sunset.
The left-handed versus right-handed asymmetry of our living world—a “chirality” seen most often in mirror-image architectures of many biomolecules—is one of its most striking features yet one of the most difficult to comprehend. Immersing chiral molecules within chiral environments is an important route to asymmetry, exploited in chemistry for synthesizing and separating chiral molecules according to their handedness. However, the thermodynamics of such a route is not well understood. In a new publication in Physical Review X, we theoretically explore this thermodynamics using a chiral nanoparticle diffusing within a chiral optical light field.
Demonstrating how chiral degrees of freedom can turn into genuine thermodynamics parameters yields a new and rich playground for further exploring chiral light-matter interactions with far-reaching consequences. To that end, we build a stochastic optomechanical model to reveal and control the mechanisms of asymmetry. One central result of our work is to highlight the thermodynamical significance of the coupling between the chirality of the particle and the chirality of the light field.
Our results pave the way to new opportunities in the context of chiral sensing, recognition, and separation of chiral objects at the nanoscale that should now be implemented experimentally and exploited.
Minghao Li arrived in the lab in 2017 for a master training, stayed for a phD and defended about one year ago , then spent one more year with us for a postdoc position. But after 1697 days as he counted himself, time of departure has arrived and he left the team last week. He is now starting a new postdoctoral position in the Quantum Sensing group of Pr Maletinsky at the University of Basel.
We will miss his good mood, his energy and his nice photos and we wish him all the best for the future !
Our perspective about chemistry under vibrational strong coupling just appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. We expose the fundamentals of light-matter strong coupling, the recent advancements in vibro-polaritonic chemistry and the numerous perspectives offered by this new approach, that is easy to implement and thus promising for future exploration of light-matter interactions in molecular and material sciences.
A new publication, presenting results obtained in collaboration with National Taiwan Normal University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University just appeared in ACS Photonics. We achieved ultrafast polarization of light by combining the anisotropic optical nonlinear response of ITO at its epsilon-near-zero region with a plasmonic nanoantennas array, at their polarization-sensitive resonance. A rotation of light polarization of more than 30° is obtained together with a π/7 phase change within 600fs. Such a large anisotropic nonlinearity is a significant step towards the realization of ultrafast polarization modulators and phase retarders.
A new publication just appeared in Angewandte Chemie International Edition , in collaboration with IPCMS, Strasbourg, and University of Heidelberg. We studied the self-assembly of a conjugated polymer under vibrational strong coupling. It appeared under electron microcopy that the supramolecular morphology is totally different from that observed in the absence of strong coupling. Morever the self-assembly kinetics is modified and depends on which bond of the solvent is coupled.
A review entitled “Manipulating matter by strong-coupling to vacuum field” just appeared in Science. It has been written by Pr T.W. Ebbesen in collaboration with Pr. F. Garcia-Vidal and Pr. C. Ciuti and it summarizes the actual knowledge on the surprizing implications of the strong coupling regime on matter properties, both on an experimental and theoretical point of view.
(Left) Charge transfer complexation between mesitylene and iodide(courtesy of K. Nagarajan). (Right) Energy transfer between donor and acceptor molecules (courtesy of J. Galego)