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.

Congratulations to first year PhD student Giordano Amoruso who won a poster prize at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Spectroscopy and Dynamics group meeting held at Durham University. Giordano’s poster described his very recent results detailing the excited state proton transfer in a model chemical system.

Tom’s invited review article, “Recent Advances in Multidimensional Ultrafast Spectroscopy”, has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of Royal Society Open Science. The paper details the recent innovations in extreme cross-peak spectroscopies, action spectroscopies such as phase-modulated fluorescence or photocurrent 2D spectroscopy, 2D Raman and 2D THz spectroscopies.

Tom has been successful in securing an University Research Fellow Enhancement Award from the Royal Society. The award of £100K will be transformative to the group, giving us funds to buy essential pieces of apparatus that will enable us to further our exploration of charge and energy transport mechanisms in nanomaterials and biomolecules.

Laboratory renovations to our laboratory were completed in April 2017, with laser installation in May 2017. We took our first (publishable) data in November 2017, down to the immense efforts of Aditi and Marta. A selection of images showing the laboratory in various stages of refurbishment, and the TA experimental apparatus are shown below.