Chirality arises from the spatial arrangement of building blocks such that the final structure is not superimposable with its mirror image. In molecules and materials that result in the appearance of optical activity, as was famously demonstrated over a century ago by Pasteur through the correlation of crystal shapes with left and right rotations of plane-polarized light. Nowadays, the ability to break the symmetry of building blocks through chemistry and nanofabrication provides a wide range of nanomaterials and nanostructures exhibiting circular dichroism and birefringence, polarized photoluminescence, and electron transport. There is a growing interest in understanding the emergence of chiral response, its optimization, and applications. The Chiral24 symposium aims to bring together leading scientists exploring the synthesis, structure, and properties of chiral nanomaterials through experiments and simulations.
- Synthesis and self-assembly of chiral nanomaterials
- Chiral surface modification of nanocrystals
- Optical activity of plasmons, excitons, and charge carriers (CD, polarized photoluminescence, spin-polarized electron transport)
- Applications of chiral phenomena in optoelectronics (hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors, chiral photodetectors, light sources, and transistors)
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Sascha is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Physical Chemistry and Head of the Laboratory for Energy Materials at EPFL (Switzerland), while he is also maintaining strong ties with the Harvard community and in particular Winthrop House which he regularly visits as NRT and SCR member.
His team employs light-matter interactions to understand the next generation of soft semiconductors with the overarching goal of maximizing energy efficiency for a sustainable future by unlocking applications ranging from flexible light-weight solar cells & displays all the way to entirely new applications in quantum information processing.
Previously, he was a research group leader and Rowland Fellow at Harvard University. Before starting his lab at Harvard, Sascha studied Chemistry at Heidelberg University (Germany) and completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he subsequently worked as EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow.
Alicia Forment-Aliaga (Valencia, 1976) is a researcher at the Molecular Science Institute (ICMol) and a senior lecturer in the School of Chemistry at the University of Valencia (UVEG), Spain. She graduated in Chemistry and carried out her PhD on molecular magnetism at the UVEG, supervised by Prof. E. Coronado and Prof. F.M. Romero. Between 2004-2008 she joined Prof. K. Kern’s group as a postdoctoral researcher at Max-Planck Institute for Solid Sate Research in Stuttgart, Germany. During this period, she was awarded with different competitive postdoctoral grants for developing her research on molecular electronics. Since July 2008 she works at ICMol at the UVEG, in Prof. E. Coronado’s group. This period comprises a postdoctoral Juan de la Cierva contract and a tenure-track Ramón y Cajal contract, both competitive contracts granted by the Spanish Government, and her current position as senior lecturer. At the ICMol she has developed a line of research in molecular surface engineering and in the last years, she has also started working on 2D materials. Particularly, she has driven her research into four specific goals: (1) Non-conventional lithographies for the organization of molecular systems; (2) formation of self-assembled monolayers for molecular spintronics; (3) scanning force microscopies for surface modification and characterization and (4) 2D materials, targeting their exfoliation, molecular functionalization and application in different areas.
Agustín is experienced in the optical design, fabrication and characterization of large area photonic architectures that can be easily implemented in emerging optoelectronic devices to improve their performance. His group specializes in soft nanoimprinting lithography, which offers an inexpensive and simple pathway to exploit the optical properties of nanophotonic structures with unconventional materials and devices.
Prof. R. Robinson received his PhD in Applied Physics from Columbia University. After his PhD, Prof. Robinson was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at University of California, Berkeley/LBNL in the research group of Paul Alivisatos. There, he worked on nanoparticle synthesis, chemical transformations of nanoparticles, and advanced property characterizations of nanoparticles. In 2008 Richard began a faculty position at Cornell University in the Materials Science Department, and is currently an associate professor. His primary research interests are: (I) Synthesis and chemical transformations in nanocrystals, (II) Nanocrystals in energy applications, and (III) Synchrotron x-ray characterization of nanomaterials.
therobinsongroup.org/
Sara Skrabalak received her B.A. in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 where she conducted research with Professor William E. Buhro. She then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she completed her Ph.D. in chemistry in fall of 2006 under the tutelage of Professor Kenneth S. Suslick. After conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Washington – Seattle with Professors Younan Xia and Xingde Li, she began on the faculty at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2008. She is currently a James H. Rudy Professor at Indiana University. She was appointed Editor-in-Chief for the ACS journals Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Letters in 2020.
She is a recipient of both NSF CAREER and DOE Early Career Awards. She is a 2012 Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a 2013 Sloan Research Fellow, a 2014 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar and 2017 Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellows. In 2014, she received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry and in 2017 was the recipient of the Frontiers in Research Excellence & Discovery Award from Research Corporation. She served as an Associate Editor for the RSC journals Nanoscale from 2017-2020 and Nanoscale Horizons from 2018-2020. Her group is developing new synthetic methods to solid materials with defined shapes and architecture then studying the properties of the materials as they are applied to applications in energy science, chemical sensing, and secured electronics.
Alessandro Stroppa (July 14th 1976) is a Research Director of the CNR-SPIN Institute (Italy) and deputy director of the research unit in L’Aquila (Italy). He received his PhD in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics from University of Trieste (Italy) in 2006 and he continued his research in computational materials science at University of Vienna in the group of Prof. Georg Kresse (VASP Team). After 2009, he joined the CNR in Italy where he became permanent staff in 2012. He is contract professor at University of L’Aquila (Italy), and invited professor at Shanghai and South East University (China).
His current research areas deal with solid-state physics and materials science. Specifically, he is interested in 3D and 2D hybrid inorganic-organic perovskites, non-magnetic and magnetic 2D systems with special focus on photo-ferroic, multiferroic, magnetoelectric, twistronic, topological, magneto-optical and non-linear optical properties, skyrmions, etc. He has great experience with Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods for the study of the structural, electronic and magnetic properties using all-electrons as well as pseudopotential approaches implemented in numerical codes. He has published about 138 peer-reviewed papers (h-index=43, Total citations 6744) in theoretical condensed matter also in collaboration with experimentalists. In 2017, 5 of his papers were Highly Cited (Source: Web of Science). He is on the World’s top 2% scientists lists published by Stanford University since 2019. He received honors such as the ‘Best 2008 New Journal of Physics Collection’; Research Highlight talk at EUROMAT 2013; Best oral talks at Italian Physical Society conferences in 2005 and 2011; Certificate of appreciation for “his important contributions to the theoretical understanding of microscopic mechanisms of multiferroicity and magnetoelectricity in perovskite metal-organic frameworks” by Nature Conference (Nankai University, 2019). He is carrying out an intense outreach activity for primary schools. [Last update Sept 04th 2023]
Selected papers
1. A. Stroppa, et al.“Electric Control of Magnetization and Interplay between Orbital Ordering and Ferroelectricity in a Multiferroic Metal-Organic Framework”, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl., 2011, 50, 5847-5850. Times cited:192.
2. A. Stroppa, et al. “Hybrid Improper Ferroelectricity in a Multiferroic and Magnetoelectric Metal-Organic Framework”, Adv. Mat., 2013, 25, 2284-2290. Times cited:215.
3. A. Stroppa, et al. “Tuning the Ferroelectric Polarization in a Multiferroic Metal-Organic Framework”, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 18126-18130. Times cited:190.
4. A. Stroppa, et al. “Electric-Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect in a Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Perovskite”, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017, 139, 12883-12886. Times cited:23.
5. A. Stroppa, et al.”Tunable ferroelectric polarization and its interplay with spin-orbit coupling in tin iodide perovskites”, Nat. Commun., 2014, 5, 5900. Times cited:175 (Highly Cited Paper)
6. A. Stroppa, “Cross coupling between electric and magnetic orders in a multiferroic metal-organic framework”, Sci. Rep., 2014, 4, 6062. Times cited:134.
7. A. Stroppa, et al. “Magneto-Optical Kerr Switching Properties of (CrI3)2 and (CrBr3/CrI3) Bilayers”, ACS Appl. Electron. Mater. 2020, 2, 5, 1380-1373. Times cited:1.
8. A. Stroppa et al. “Activating magnetoelectric optical properties by twisting antiferromagnetic bilayers”, Phys. Rev. B, 106, 184408 (2022). Times cited: 0
Selected links (Outreach)
https://www.spin.cnr.it/outreach-and-t-t/events/item/240-spin-at-maker-faire-2023
https://outreach.cnr.it/risorsa/231/giocando-con-la-geometria
https://outreach.cnr.it/risorsa/79/dalla-geometria-alla-geo-materia-un-affascinante-percorso-didattico