Deciphering & controlling the mechanisms of energy flow across materials

Spectroscopy and microscopy have the potential to reveal the structure and dynamics of complex materials, ranging from chromophores in solution to molecular aggregates, nanomaterials, and even quantum sensors. Yet, disentangling these signals and extracting an intuitive picture of how excitations form, move, and transform is one of the most persistent challenges in physical chemistry. In this talk, I will offer three vignettes on our work developing and applying approaches to predict, measure, and understand how light-matter interactions can reveal the mechanisms of energy flow that set the stage for controlled energy harvesting and quantum sensing. Specifically, I will discuss the challenge of describing small polaron formation, relaxation, and transport in materials like transition metal oxides. I will then show how judiciously formulated dimensionality reduction can help enable 2D spectroscopy-based microscopy to track energy flow in molecular systems, like ionic liquid electrolytes in model batteries. Finally, I will illustrate how we can build fast and accurate algorithms to extract signals from quantum noise - signals that reveal structure and dynamics in the quantum world and which promise an exciting future for quantum sensing technology.

Speaker: Andres Montoya-Castillo, University of Colorado, Boulder