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Research

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Research Interests

Our research group is focused on the ultrafast properties of materials, with the goal of visualizing, capturing, and directing the atomic-scale processes that underlie how materials and devices function. These processes involve time-scales extending down to 10-15 seconds, and represent fundamental limits to device efficiency, speed, and reliability. Broad applications to information storage technologies, energy-related materials, and nanoscale optoelectronic devices follow from this work. By seeing directly how these processes occur in real time and in-situ, we seek to go one step further and engineer new functionality by directly manipulating atomic and electronic degrees of freedom and harnessing the flow energy between them. These experiments are interdisciplinary and span a range of fields within materials science, merging aspects of fundamental and applied science in ways that have never been possible before.

Current efforts are focused on elucidating atomic-scale dynamical processes in energy related materials and nanocrystals, the mechanisms by which ions hop in battery materials, electron-phonon coupling processes in single quantum emitters, the atomic-scale motions and dynamical disorder within ferroelectrics, electrically triggered non-equilibrium and metastable states, and the application of atomic-scale and electronic visualization approaches to two-dimensional materials.