News: 2024

An Engel group article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters describes unexpected behavior observed in electrons passing through a conical intersection. They found the final electronic population had drastically different vibrational coherences from those it started with, a first-of-its-kind observation that is  unexplained by the semiclassical theory on conical intersections.

The Scherer group introduced a method of calculating the entropy production rate of overdamped, non-conservative, N-body systems. Their article in Physical Review E uses a novel collective mode decomposition and force field decomposition to show that the rates of entropy production and power dissipation are equal in these systems, in agreement with a theorem by Seifert.

Sarah King and collaborators at UChicago, Chicago State University, and University of Illinois Chicago were awarded $4.8 million from the NIH BRAIN Initiative toward developing a novel PEEM microscope designed for brain connectomics.

The King group introduced a strategy for functionalizing a sulfur-containing transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) with multimolecular architectures.
Their article in ACS Applied Optical Materials describes how molecular adsorption in the growth and characterization of ion-linked bilayers offers a new pathway to introduce complex molecules onto sulfur-containing TMDs.

The Young group performed the first ever all-attosecond pump-probe x-ray spectroscopy of condensed matter. Their Science publication describes how the team struck liquid water with powerful, attoseconds-long x-ray pulses that took a snapshot of the electron behavior with the nuclei kept motionlessly in place

Princeton University Press published Soft Matter: Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications by Vincenzo Vitelli, Wim Van Saarlos, and Zorana Zeravcic.

NanoPattern Technologies cofounded by Dmitri Talapin has raised $1.5 million, including a $1 million NSF grant, to expand its work creating commercial quantum dot ink.