Professor Stephen Bradforth (University of Southern California, USA) will be visiting Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor to collaborate with the Oliver group during September. Steve is an expert in DNA photodamage/protection and solar energy conversion, studying these phenomena with  ultrafast spectroscopic techniques.

Our research on multidimensional optical spectroscopies was detailed in a recent review paper published in Royal Society Open Science and forms “part of the ‘New talent’ special collection of invited articles to showcase some of the exciting work being funded by the Royal Society.”

Our paper entitled “Surface functionalisation significantly changes the physical and electronic properties of carbon nano-dots” has been accepted in the journal Nanoscale. Working jointly with the Galan group and researchers in Chemistry and Physics at the University of Bristol, we used an arsenal of analytical and spectroscopic techniques to explore the physical and electronic structure of a variety of glycan functionalised carbon nano-dots.  Carbon nano-dots are emerging as non-toxic fluorescent nanoparticles useful for biological applications such as targeting cancer cells or fluorescent labelling. Our studies reveal, counter to prior hypotheses, that the surface functionalisation does not always result in a homogenous corona surrounding the carbon dot core, and the choice of carbohydrate significantly affects the electronic structure of the surface CD states. The article can be found here.

Congratulations to Marta Duchi who won one of the three poster prizes at the Celebration of Bristol Chemistry V– an early career researcher event sponsored jointly by the University of Bristol and Royal Society of Chemistry. Her poster was entitled ‘Charge Transfer Dynamics and Vibrational Wave Packets Explored with Ultrafast Techniques’.

BCFN students Fabiola and Teo have joined the Oliver group for their extended projects. Fabiola is working on iridescent chloroplasts with Tom and Heather Whitney, Teo is working with Carmen Galan and Tom to synthesise and characterise an array of carbon nanodots.

Congratulations to Victoria Taylor who won the three minute thesis people’s choice prize with her presentation “Ultrafast lasers – Shining a light on the future of renewable energy.” The three minute thesis final was held on 9th May 2018 as part of the University of Bristol’s Research without Borders event.

Oral abstract submissions are now open for the Faraday Discussion on Ultrafast Photoinduced Energy and Charge Transfer (8-10th April 2019).

The meeting will focus on the following themes:
i) Energy and charge-transfer in natural photosynthesis
ii) Photovoltaics and bio-inspired light harvesting
iii) Photo-induced electron transfer
iv) Photo-protection/photo-damage in natural systems

More details can be found at rsc.li/ultrafast-fd2019.

Congratulations to Victoria who is through to the semi-finals of three minute thesis competition organised by the British Doctoral College as part of the Research Without Borders Exhibition.

A summary of some of the recent work ongoing in our group can be found on the group poster. Click for a high resolution link.

Victoria’s paper, Investigating the Role of the Organic Cation in Formamidinium Lead Iodide Perovskite using Ultrafast Spectroscopy has just been accepted in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Victoria’s work addresses the controversial topic of long-lived (anti-) ferroelectric domains through organic cation alignment in lead-halide perovskite thin films using two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy. Through anisotropy measurements, Victoria showed that alignment was short-lived and cannot explain the observed low charge-carrier recombination rates. Complimentary time-resolved infrared measurements examined the vibrational dynamics of the cation in the conduction band. These data show an unusual enhancement of the vibrational dipole moment due to nascent proximal charge carriers. The very talented Dr. Devendra Tiwari prepared the thin film samples using a novel preparation method. The studies were performed both at Bristol and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The ASAP version of the paper can be found here and the work is featured on the School of Chemistry’s news website.