Title: Transforming materials with a little light
Abstract: My group leverages light-matter interactions to interrogate and control material and molecular function. I will focus on our recent realization of wavelike, nearly lossless electronic transport in van der Waals semiconductors. These remarkable transport regimes arise from spontaneous hybridization of electronic particles with long-wavelength excitations, such as acoustic phonons to form two-dimensional acoustic polarons, and light to form polaritons. This hybridization protects electronic particles from scattering with lattice defects and vibrations, enabling macroscopic transport with minimal dissipation even at room temperature, far outpacing current gold standards of electronics. I will also discuss the prospect of hybridizing material excitations with carefully-tuned vacuum fields to realize ultrahigh-mobility, defect-tolerant semiconductors in technologically scalable device configurations using both inorganic and organic materials. In all cases, we develop ultrafast optical imaging capabilities to track energy flow with femtosecond resolution and few-nanometer precision, providing detailed measurements of transport dynamics and sensitivity to both static and dynamic disorder.
Bio: Milan Delor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Sheffield with Prof. Julia Weinstein, where he focused on quantum control of molecular photophysics using multidimensional spectroscopy. In his postdoc at UC Berkeley with Prof. Naomi Ginsberg, he developed new imaging technologies to track energy flow in materials. He started his independent career at Columbia in 2019. His group focuses on light-matter interactions, with a special interest in identifying and controlling new electronic transport regimes and quantum phases in materials and molecules. He is a recipient of the Beckman Young Investigator award, the NSF CAREER award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award.
Faculty Host: Prof. Martin Zanni