Research Topics:
The group has a long standing experience in the investigation of the following phenomena:
inter- and intra-molecular charge and energy transfer, photphysics and nonlinear optical response
in complex systems like molecular crystals, molecular aggregates, metal and semiconductor nanoparticles.
The techniques set up to investiagte these phenomena are:
Micro and Macro Raman Spectroscopies: RRS, SERS
Two-photon induced fluorescence
Z-scan
Transient Absorption with fs time resolution
Two-Dimensional FWM experiments
Time Resolved Fluorescence Microscopy: FLIM and FCS
In the follwoing more details are given on some specific topics:
Topic 1: quantum coherent mechanisms of energy transfer and quantum transport (project QUENTRHEL).
Electronic energy transfer is a ubiquitous photophysical process that plays a crucial role in the light-harvesting capabilities of natural antenna complexes, and could also hold important implications in artificial systems. Emerging experimental breakthroughs indicate that the dynamics of light harvesting is not fully described by a classical random-walk picture, but also quantum coherent transfer takes place. QUENTRHEL is aimed to the development of new spectroscopic tools able to unveil the presence and the nature of vibrational modes acting during the energy migration and possibly driving coherent mechanisms of energy transfer in artificial helical systems.
Topic 2: optical adressing of molecular machines with advanced ultrafast spectroscopic techniques (project MULTI).
MULTI aims at proposing a new approach to computing at the nanoscale that gives up the notion of the conventional Boolean ‘true-false’ switches. The basic idea is to treat a single atom, molecule or a supra(bio)molecular assembly like a logic element and take advantage of internal degrees of freedom of such atoms or molecules to implement unconventional logic operations by optical addressing in solution. Advanced spectroscopic techniques such as 2D electronic spectroscopy will be emploied to this aim.
Benefits of MULTI approach are higher information rates for inputs and outputs, enhanced rates of processing due to parallelism and computing in memory and exploration of continuous logic.
Topic3 Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS): Measurement of SERS Enhancement Factors, SERS studies of plasmonic substrates for sensing applications Investigation of the near- and far- filed properties of plasmonic substrates.
Topic 4: microfluidic as a tool to investigate biological processes under streaming conditions (link).
Microfluidic (MF) is used to investigate complex processes taking place in a flowing medium under extremely controlled conditions. Among these there are for example: chemical reactions kinetics, cell growth and morphology, internalization of drugs or nanosized objects inside cells, structural evolution of proteins or polymer chains under flow conditions, growth and development of artificial self-assembled nanostructures etc. In my research group we are especially devoted to the development of spectroscopic tools that allow us following in real time such processes. The techniques implemented up to now are: fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and fluorescence lifetime (FL) with 100 ps time resolution.
Topic 5:
