Publications related to The LOUVRE Laboratory: State-of-the-Art Ultrafast Ultraviolet Spectroscopies for Molecular and Materials Science

Exciton migration in two-dimensional materials

Excitons play an essential role in the optical response of two-dimensional materials. These are bound states showing up in the band gaps of many-body systems and are conceived as quasiparticles formed by an electron and a hole. By performing real-time simu ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Numerical Study of the Attosecond Free-Electron Laser Pulse Generation in the Soft X-ray Regime at the SwissFEL

Longdi Zhu

Isolated attosecond pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser are in high demand for attosecond science, which enables the probing of electron dynamics by X-ray nonlinear spectroscopy and single-particle imaging. The aim of this thesis is to simulate attos ...

EPFL2024

Investigating Non-equilibrium Physics in Wide Bandgap Semiconductors and Quantum Materials via Ultrafast Spectroscopy

Hui-Yuan Chen

This thesis uses femtosecond laser spectroscopy in studying strong correlation in condensed matters that are pertinent to future technology: a wide bandgap perovskite and a quantum material, with the employment of ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy in th ...

EPFL2024

Unearthing the foundational role of anharmonicity in heat transport in glasses

The time-honored Allen -Feldman theory of heat transport in glasses is generally assumed to predict a finite value for the thermal conductivity, even if it neglects the anharmonic broadening of vibrational normal modes. We demonstrate that the harmonic app ...

Amer Physical Soc2024

Photogeneration of Hydrogen: Insights from a Pt(II)-Complex Incorporated into a Covalent Organic Framework

Paolo Costa, Federico De Biasi

Pt(II)-based molecular catalysts stand as a prototypical system in hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) owing to their consistently elevated activity levels. Their integration into heterogeneous systems thus provides an ideal platform to develop catalytic ma ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag2024

Terahertz emission from diamond nitrogen-vacancy centers

László Forró, Ferenc Simon, Sándor Kollarics, Bence Gábor Márkus

Coherent light sources emitting in the terahertz range are highly sought after for fundamental research and applications. Terahertz lasers rely on achieving population inversion. We demonstrate the generation of terahertz radiation using nitrogen-vacancy c ...

Amer Assoc Advancement Science2024

Light Emission and Conductance Fluctuations in Electrically Driven and Plasmonically Enhanced Molecular Junctions

Christophe Marcel Georges Galland, Sakthi Priya Amirtharaj, Wen Chen, Konstantin Malchow

Electrically connected and plasmonically enhanced molecular junctions combine the optical functionalities of high field confinement and enhancement (cavity function), and of high radiative efficiency (antenna function) with the electrical functionalities o ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

Experimental demonstration of attosecond pump-probe spectroscopy with an X-ray free-electron laser

Jun Wang, Christoph Bostedt, Siqi Li, Zhen Zhang, Zhaoheng Guo, Xiang Li

Pump-probe experiments with subfemtosecond resolution are the key to understanding electronic dynamics in quantum systems. Here we demonstrate the generation and control of subfemtosecond pulse pairs from a two-colour X-ray free-electron laser. By measurin ...

Nature Publishing Group2024

Magnetism of Single Surface Adsorbed Atoms Studied with Radio-Frequency STM

Clément Marie Soulard

This thesis investigates the magnetic properties of single atoms and molecules adsorbed on thin magnesium oxide decoupling layers, grown on a silver single crystal. To address these systems experimentally, we use a low temperature scanning tunneling micros ...

EPFL2024

Influence of ionization and cumulative effects on laser-induced crystallization in multilayer dielectrics

Yves Bellouard, Ruben Ricca, Victor Carle Adrien Boureau

Crystallization of amorphous layers has been demonstrated under various radically different laser-exposure conditions, including continuous wave (cw) and pulsed lasers. Here, we investigate the specific role of ionization in the crystallization of dielectr ...

2024

Advanced Silicon and SWIR Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes: Design, Simulation, and Characterization

Ekin Kizilkan

Low-level light detection with high spatial and timing accuracy is a growing area of interest by virtue of applications such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), biomedical imaging, time-resolved Raman spectroscopy, and quantum applications. Single-phot ...

EPFL2024

Shaped Laser Pulses for Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM: Outrunning Crystallization during Flash Melting

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water vitrifies if cooled at rates above 3 × 105 K/s. In contrast, when the resulting amorphous ice is flash heated, crystallization occurs even at a more than 10 times higher heating rate, as we have recently shown. This may present an issue for microseco ...

2024

Ultrafast Electron Microscopy of Nanoscale Charge Dynamics in Semiconductors

Fabrizio Carbone, Ivan Madan, Giovanni Maria Vanacore, Francesco Barantani, Ido Kaminer, Kangpeng Wang, Simone Gargiulo

The ultrafast dynamics of charge carriers in solids plays a pivotal role in emerging optoelectronics, photonics, energy harvesting, and quantum technology applications. However, the investigation and direct visualization of such nonequilibrium phenomena re ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Progress and prospects in nonlinear extreme-ultraviolet and X-ray optics and spectroscopy

Majed Chergui

Free-electron lasers and high-harmonic-generation table-top systems are new sources of extreme-ultraviolet to hard X-ray photons, providing ultrashort pulses that are intense, coherent and tunable. They are enabling a broad range of nonlinear optical and s ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Automatic and high-precision microseismic monitoring of progressive failure prior, during, and after tunnel excavation

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Christophe Nussbaum, Seyyedmaalek Momeni

Acoustic emission (AE) monitoring is commonly used to inspect the health of a structure continuously. During fracture processes elastic waves of AE are created and emitted, and sensors can capture these waves. The acquired signals can be processed to track ...

2023

Atomic-level structure determination of amorphous molecular solids by NMR

Manuel Cordova, Arthur César Pinon, David Lyndon Emsley, Pinelopi Moutzouri

Structure determination of amorphous materials remains challenging, owing to the disorder inherent to these materials. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) powder crystallography is a powerful method to determine the structure of molecular solids, but disorder ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Vibrational NDT with Under-sampled Data through Physics-informed Neural Networks

Olga Fink

The vibrational response of solid materials and structural components is substantially governed by their mechanical and geometrical properties. Low-frequency vibrations and modal frequencies are sensitive to global geometrical deviations, while high-freque ...

2023

Element- and enantiomer-selective visualization of molecular motion in real-time

Majed Chergui, Malte Oppermann, Jérémy Raymond Jean Maurice Rouxel

Ultrafast optical-domain spectroscopies allow to monitor in real time the motion of nuclei in molecules. Achieving element-selectivity had to await the advent of time resolved X-ray spectroscopy, which is now commonly carried at X-ray free electron lasers. ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Bridging Native and Intrinsic Structures of Microhydrated Biomolecules by Cold Ion Spectroscopy

Andrei Zviagin

Solving native structures of such large molecules, like biomolecules, is often challenging, particularly due to the potentially infinite number of non-covalent interactions with water. In this thesis, we report the use of cold ion gas-phase action spectros ...

EPFL2023

A universal route to efficient non-linear response via Thomson scattering in linear solids

Cheng Wang, Gabriel Aeppli, Joe Martin Bailey, Junjie Li, Min Chen, Ji Zhou

Non-linear materials are cornerstones of modern optics and electronics. Strong dependence on the intrinsic properties of particular materials, however, inhibits the at-will extension of demanding non-linear effects, especially those second-order ones, to w ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023