Yoseline Rosales Cabara joined our group on October 1st for starting a phD thesis on optical trapping under the supervision of Cyriaque Genet. She did her master degree in the University of Geneva, working on two-photon excited fluorescence by quantum correlated photon pairs. She is installed in room 120 and her email adress is rosalescabara (at) unistra (dot) fr.
The paper on ultra-strong vibrational coupling mentioned in our post from September 9 has been published today, in the last issue of Physical Review Letters. You can read the final version here or download it from our publications page.
You are probably already aware but we are glad to write one more time that our colleague Jean-Pierre Sauvage was awarded today the Nobel prize in chemistry for the development of molecular machines. He is sharing it with Prof. Fraser Stoddart, from Northewestern University, USA, and Prof. Ben Feringa, from University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Congratulations to all of them !
As we all miss him in the lab, our former postdoc Atef Shalabney, now in Braude College in Israël, will be back for a three weeks research stay from October 3rd. If you wish to meet him, he will be installed in room 107.
We are pleased to announce for next week a mini-symposium with two seminars on optical forces given by members of the PhD jury of Gabriel Schnoering:
Prof. Mikael KALL, from the Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology,Göteborg, Sweden, on Optically driven plasmonic nanorotors
and Prof. Romain QUIDANT from ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Barcelona, Spain, on Nano-optomechanics with an optically levitated nanoparticle
This mini-symposium will take place in the conference room of ISIS, on Wednesday 21th of September at 3pm.
Then the next day, on Thursday 22. at 9.30am, Gabriel will defend his PhD thesis entitled On the Brownian dynamics of a particle in a bistable optical trap. This work has been done under the supervision of Dr. Cyriaque Genet and Prof. T.W. Ebbesen. A small reception will then follow at the 6th floor of ISIS.
May the (optical) force be with him…
Here is a new paper accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, where we demonstrate that a molecular vibration can be ultra-strongly coupled to multiple infra-red cavity modes, with Rabi splittings reaching 24% of the vibration frequencies. This effect induces a whole vibrational ladder of heavy polaritonic states perfectly resolved. The vibrational ultra-strong coupling regime, which impact both the optical and the molecular properties of the coupled systems, thus offers promising possibilities in particular in the context of mode-selective chemistry. For now, you can read our work on arXiv and also download it from our publications page.
Since the 1st of September, Joan Teixidor has started a six months training in our lab. He is a former master student in microengineering from EPFL Lausanne. During his master project, done in Stanford, he built up a microfluidics system to study the mechanobiology of stem cells under uniaxial stretching. If you want to meet him, he is installed in room 120 and his adress is teixidor (at) unistra (dot) fr.
A little improvement of our publications section has started today : you can now directly download the pdf versions of our most recent papers. We will progressively add the older ones in the coming weeks.
* a little bit of reading, that cannot hurt… title of a nice radio show on the french radio France Inter
A fruitful collaboration between our group and Josef Moran team at ISIS revealed another very promising aspect of strong coupling : we proved indeed that one can modify a chemical reaction by strongly coupling a vibrational mode of the reactant. The reaction slows down significantly and the relative change in the reaction rate under strong coupling depends on the Rabi splitting energy.
The work had been published in Angewandte Chemie and you can read it here or download it from our publications page.
Wa are glad to announce a coming publication in Nano Letters (to be downloaded here), resulting from a collaboration between our group and Paolo Samori’s group. Room temperature strong coupling of WS2 monolayer exciton transitions to metallic Fabry–Pérot and plasmonic optical cavities is demonstrated, suggesting many possibilities for combining light–matter hybridization with spin and valleytronics
