2025 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium CH01-Ultrafast Optical and Structural Probes for Understanding Emerging Materials

Time-resolved spectroscopies provide material scientists the high temporal resolution to characterize physical processes in a variety of complex and emerging materials, ranging from semiconductors and dielectrics to metals and superconductors. Recent advances in pulsed laser technologies have enabled ultrafast probes to explore a wide energy range from deep ultraviolet to the mid-infrared and terahertz, resulting in new perspectives of material characteristics that encompass optical, electronic, magnetic, thermal, and structural properties. This fundamental knowledge is further expanded to high spatial resolution via innovative microscopies and tip-based techniques coupled with ultrafast laser sources. These emerging experimental methods are fueling many technologically and fundamentally relevant discoveries in various systems, including those which constitute biological matter, quantum materials, and materials for energy conversion and storage. Moreover, recent developments in pulsed X-ray and electron sources have further enabled material scientists to track the dynamic structural evolutions under ultrafast photoexcitation, to resolve energy transport and access metastable material phases with unconventional structure-property relationships. This symposium brings together a unique and diverse set of ultrafast spectroscopies (e.g., optical, terahertz, X-ray, electron beam, quantum metrology) and material scientists to converge established and emerging techniques and to explore novel approaches to solve grand material science problems in quantum and energy sciences.

Topics will include:

Ultrafast photo-excited charge carrier dynamics and carrier mobility of materials examined by time-resolved and spatiotemporal optical probes (i.e., transient microscopy and imaging, tip-based transient infrared and terahertz spectroscopy) applied to solar energy, optoelectronic, energy-storage and quantum materials
Energy and charge transfer processes and many-body physics in materials (nanocrystals, organic semiconductors, 2D materials, heterostructures, halide perovskites, epitaxial semiconductors) and at material interfaces probed by multi-dimensional and nonlinear optical spectroscopies
Dynamics of photo-induced behaviors and phase transformations probed by time-resolved optical, X-ray absorption/diffraction and electron diffraction/microscopy techniques applied to energy, plasmonic, and quantum materials
Defect physics, electron-phonon interactions and hot carrier effects in light-absorbing, light-emitting, plasmonic, and photonic materials probed by time-resolved optical and structural probes
Combination of time-resolved optical, electrical, electrochemical probes (e.g., spatiotemporal mapping of charge and ion motions in materials) applied to the investigations of functional devices, microelectronics, and materials under perturbations (magnetic field, electrical field, electrochemical potential or pressure)
Understanding charge carrier transport, transfer and charge collection in emerging materials (e.g., conductive metal-organic or covalent organic frameworks, MXenes, two-dimensional heterostructures, mixed-dimensional nanomaterials, nanowires) with contact-free time-domain optical spectroscopies

Invited Speakers:

Artem Bakulin (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
Mischa Bonn (Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Germany)
Sum Tze Chien (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Tyler Cocker (Michigan State University, USA)
Keshav Dani (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Milan Delor (Columbia University, USA)
Marina Filip (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
David Flannigan (University of Minnesota, USA)
Naomi Ginsberg (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Burak Guzelturk (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Laura Herz (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
Felipe Jornada (Stanford University, USA)
Hannah Joyce (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)
Sarah King (The University of Chicago, USA)
Scott Kushing (California Institute of Technology, USA)
Aaron Lindenberg (Stanford University, USA)
Omar Mohammed (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia)
Keith Nelson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Oleg Prezhdo (University of Southern California, USA)
Richard Schaller (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
Andrej Singer (Cornell University, USA)
William Tisdale (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Lyubov Titova (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
Giovanni Vanacore (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy)
Wei Xiong (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Haiming Zhu (Zhejiang University, China)
Xiaoyang Zhu (Columbia University, USA)