Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, New York
WELCOME TO DEL-LABS
Directing Electrons with Light
LATEST NEWS
05/2025
We are honored to receive the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award!
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04/2025
Many congratulations to Noah, who was awarded the NSF GRFP!
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02/2025
Milan is named a 2025 Sloan Fellow!
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01/2025
Ding's paper on spatiotemporal imaging of nonlinear optics in van der Waals waveguides appears in Nature Nanotechnology! Check out how we image ultrafast light propagation and nonlinear conversion in waveguides and directly extract phase-matching angles.
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01/2025
We are honored to receive the NSF CAREER award!
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12/2024
Many congratulations to Shan-Wen, who successfully defended his thesis, the very first from the group!
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11/2024
Welcome to graduate students Vicente Galicia and Simon Blackhurst!
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08/2024
Welcome to Columbia Quantum Initiative postdoctoral fellows Victoria Quiros-Cordero and Fuyang Tay!
Read all news here.
RESEARCH
The efficient transport and interconversion of energy between photons, electrons, ions and heat underpins life on earth. In modern technologies ranging from solar panels to computers, batteries and health sensors, energy moves slowly, randomly and often inefficiently towards target conversion sites. We aim to direct energy flow in emerging materials in ways that are targeted and efficient, moving beyond random motion to unleash new paradigms for extracting more energy from solar panels, storing more energy in batteries, speeding up information transport and processing, and exploiting correlated electronic systems for new applications.
We use light as a powerful stimulus to initiate, image and control electronic behavior in emerging materials on extreme spatiotemporal scales. Questions we explore include:
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How do we image individual electrons moving and interacting with their surroundings in material lattices?
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How do we control the direction and speed at which energy packets move towards functional targets?
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How do we unlock exotic emergent phenomena and exploit them in modern devices?
The ongoing explosion of discoveries in quantum, meta- and nanomaterials provides the perfect platform for us to answer these questions now.
Super-resolution imaging
of electronic transport and material energy landscapes
Optical control of nuclear-electronic coupling and energy flow on material mesoscales
Optical manipulation of strongly correlated electronic behavior with confined light
In the process of answering these questions, we invent new tools capable of non-invasively imaging events happening over femtoseconds to hours at the single-nanometer scale. These tools are often relevant to a broad range of scientific disciplines: think taking movies of self-assembling biological or material building blocks, of neurons emitting action potentials, and of non-dissipative electronic transport in superconductors.
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In addition to gaining a deep fundamental understanding of light-matter interactions, students and postdocs in the group acquire experience in nonlinear optics, super-resolution microscopy, ultrafast visible, IR and terahertz spectroscopy, and materials design and characterization. We collaborate broadly with both theoretical and experimental research groups at Columbia and beyond.
THE TEAM
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Postdoctoral scholar, 2016-2019
Ginsberg group, University of California, Berkeley
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Doctoral Prize Fellow, 2015
​PhD Physical Chemistry, 2010-2014
Weinstein group, University of Sheffield​
BSc Chemistry, 2015-2019
National Taiwan University
BA Chemistry and Global Health, 2015-2019
Washington University in St. Louis
BSc Chemistry, 2014-2019
Wuhan University
​Visiting researcher, North Carolina
State University
BS Chemistry & Physics, 2016-2020
University of California, Los Angeles
BS Chemistry, 2016-2020
University of Texas at Austin
BS Materials Science, 2017-2021
Northwestern University
BS Chemistry, 2014-2018
MEd Curriculum and Instruction, 2018-2019
University of Maryland, College Park
PhD Chemistry, 2015-2021
Yonsei University (South Korea)
BS Chemistry, 2018-2022
Bard College
BS Chemistry 2019-2023
University of Chicago
BS Chemistry 2019 - 2023
Princeton University
BS Chemical Engineering, 2018-2022
University of California, Berkeley
Chem Engineering & Materials Science
BS 2016-2019, MS 2019-2021
Ewha Womans University (South Korea)
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PhD Applied Physics, 2019-2024
Rice University
PhD Materials Science & Engineering, 2019-2024
Georgia Institute of Technology
BS Chemistry, 2020-2024
University of California, San Diego
BS Chemistry, 2020-2024
Brigham Young University
Read more about the team here.
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We continue to look for motivated students and postdocs interested in spectroscopy, microscopy and materials science to join the group. Postdoc candidates have a strong background in physical chemistry or physics and experience with one or a combination of the following: ultrafast spectroscopy, super-resolution microscopy, quantum materials, nonlinear optics. Contact Milan for more information.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Ding Xu, Zhi Hao Peng, Chiara Trovatello, Shan-Wen Cheng, Xinyi Xu, Aaron Sternbach, Dmitri N. Basov, P. James Schuck, Milan Delor (2024). Spatiotemporal imaging of nonlinear optics in van der Waals waveguides. Nature Nanotechnology, in press.
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Lee I, Melton S, Xu D, Delor M (2024). Controlling Molecular Photoisomerization in Photonic Cavities through Polariton Funneling. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 146, 9544-9553.
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Baxter J, Koay C, Xu D, Cheng SW, Tulyagankhodjaev J, Shih P, Roy X, Delor M (2023). Coexistence of Incoherent and Ultrafast Coherent Exciton Transport in a Two-Dimensional Superatomic Semiconductor. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, vol. 14, pp. 10249-10256.
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Tulyagankhodjaev J, Shih P, Yu J, Russell J, Chica D, Reynoso M, Su Haowen, Stenor A, Roy X, Berkelbach T, Delor M (2023). Room Temperature Wavelike Exciton Transport in a van der Waals Superatomic Semiconductor. Science, vol. 382, pp. 438-442.
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Cheng SW, Xu D, Su H, Baxter J, Holtzman L, Watanabe K, Taniguchi T, Hone J, Barmak K, Delor M (2023). Optical Imaging of Ultrafast Phonon-Polariton Propagation through an Excitonic Sensor. Nano Letters, vol. 23, pp. 9936-9942.
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Xu D, Mandal A, Baxter J, Cheng SW, Lee I, Su H, Liu S, Reichman D, Delor M (2023). Ultrafast imaging of polariton propagation and interactions. Nature Communications, vol. 14, 3881.
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Su H, Xu D, Cheng SW, Li B, Liu S, Watanabe K, Taniguchi T, Hone J, Delor M (2022). Dark-exciton driven energy funneling into dielectric inhomogeneities in two-dimensional semiconductors. Nano Letters, vol. 22, pp. 2843-2850.
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Delor M, Weaver H, Yu Q, Ginsberg N (2020).
Imaging material functionality through 3D nanoscale tracking of energy flow
Nature Materials, vol. 19, pp. 56-62.
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Delor M, Archer S, Keane T, Meijer A, Sazanovich I, Greetham G, Towrie M, Weinstein J (2017).
Directing the path of light-induced electron transfer at a molecular fork using vibrational excitation
Nature Chemistry, vol. 9, pp. 1099-1104.
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Delor M, Scattergood P, Sazanovich I, Parker A, Greetham G, Meijer A, Towrie M, Weinstein J (2014).
Toward control of electron transfer in donor-acceptor molecules by bond-specific infrared excitation
Science, vol. 346, pp. 1492-1495.
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CONTACT
Columbia University
Department of Chemistry
3000 Broadway, 117 Havemeyer Hall
New York, NY 10027
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Office: 506 Havemeyer
Lab: 117 Havemeyer
