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WELCOME TO DEL-LABS

Directing Electrons with Light

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LATEST NEWS

11/2023

We're very excited to welcome graduate students Sarah Melton, Yoon Nah, Noah Bussell and André Koch Liston to the group!

11/2023

James' paper describing new transport phenomena in superatomic solids, including ballistic excitons through microscopic superradiance, appears in JPCL!

10/2023

Jack's groundbreaking paper on room-temperature ballistic exciton transport in a superatomic semiconductor appears in Science! Featuring awesome materials from the Roy lab and awesome theory from the Berkelbach group. Read Ellen Neff's press release here.

10/2023

Shan-Wen's paper on ultrafast imaging of phonon-polariton propagation appears in Nano Letters! Check out how you can use visible light and a 2D semiconductor sensor layer to probe mid-IR phonon-polaritons with femtosecond resolution and few-nanometer precision.

09/2023

Having completed his postdoc, James begins his new position as a research scientist at SLAC - congratulations!

06/2023

Ding and Arkajit's comprehensive work on imaging polariton transport and polariton-lattice interactions appears in Nature Communications!

06/2023

Congratulations to Yongseok for receiving the prestigious Sejong Science Postdoctoral Fellowship!

06/2023

We're delighted to welcome Emma Lian from Stony Brook University for a summer REU!

05/2023

Congratulations to Ding for being awarded the prestigious Kathy Chen Fellowship for excellence in Chemistry! And congratulations to Paul for being awarded the Miller Teaching Award! Both very well deserved.

04/2023

Arkajit and Ding's paper on the development of a microscopic theory of multimode polariton dispersion appears in Nano Letters, an important paper detailing the correct use of coupled oscillator type models for multi-mode microcavities.

Read all news here.

Home: Latest News
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.

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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:

  • How do we image individual electrons moving and interacting with their surroundings in material lattices?

  • How do we control the direction and speed at which energy packets move towards functional targets?

  • 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.

Home: Research

Super-resolution imaging

of electronic transport and material energy landscapes

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Optical control of nuclear-electronic coupling and energy flow on material mesoscales

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Optical manipulation of strongly correlated electronic behavior with confined light

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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.

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

Home: The Team
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SHAN-WEN CHENG

Graduate Student
 

sc4603@columbia.edu

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VICKY (HAOWEN) SU

Graduate Student
 

hs3140@columbia.edu

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MILAN DELOR

Assistant Professor
and Principal Investigator

 

milan.delor@columbia.edu

Postdoctoral scholar, 2016-2019

Ginsberg group, University of California, Berkeley

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

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DING XU

Graduate Student
 

dx2192@columbia.edu

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JACK TULYAG

Graduate Student
 

jack.tulyag@columbia.edu

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INKI LEE

Graduate Student
 

inki.lee@columbia.edu

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

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YONGSEOK HONG

Postdoc
 

yh3593@columbia.edu

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PAUL BROWN

Graduate Student
 

ptb2119@columbia.edu

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ANDREA DAI

Graduate Student
 

ad4033@columbia.edu

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)

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MICHELLE REYNOSO

Graduate Student
 

mer2261@columbia.edu

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KAYLA PHAM

Undergraduate Student
 

kp2998@columbia.edu

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SARAH MELTON

Graduate Student
 

srm2240@columbia.edu

BS Chemistry, 2018-2022

Bard College

BA Chemistry 2022 -

Columbia University

BS Chemistry 2019-2023

University of Chicago

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NOAH BUSSELL

Graduate Student
 

nib2120@columbia.edu

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YOON NAH

Graduate Student
 

yn2452@columbia.edu

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ANDRE KOCH LISTON

Graduate Student
 

alk2244@columbia.edu

Read more about the team here.

Alumni page.

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 chemical physics or physical chemistry and experience with one or a combination of the following: ultrafast spectroscopy, super-resolution microscopy, quantum materials, nonlinear optics. Contact Milan for more information.

BS Chemistry 2019 - 2023

Princeton University

Chem Engineering & Materials Science
BS 2016-2019, MS 2019-2021

Ewha Womans University (South Korea)

BS Chemical Engineering, 2018-2022

University of California, Berkeley

Home: Publications

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

Home: Contact

CONTACT

Columbia University
Department of Chemistry
3000 Broadway, 117 Havemeyer Hall
New York, NY 10027

Office: 506 Havemeyer

Lab: 117 Havemeyer

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