Research Interests

Our research seeks to understand and control ultrafast electronic processes in quantum materials. In particular, we investigate how electrons, spins, and excitons behave, interact, and evolve far from equilibrium on femtosecond time scales and nanometer length scales. These nonequilibrium dynamics govern fundamental processes such as energy relaxation, charge and exciton transport, spin dynamics, many-body interactions, and light–matter coupling, while also determining the performance limits of future electronic, spintronic, excitonic, and photonic technologies.

A major focus of our work is on emerging low-dimensional materials and heterostructures, including graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, van der Waals heterostructures, two-dimensional magnets, and inorganic–organic hybrid materials. These systems provide unique opportunities to explore new physical phenomena arising from reduced dimensionality, strong Coulomb interactions, interfacial coupling, stacking order, and broken symmetries. We are particularly interested in how these effects can be engineered to create novel electronic, magnetic and photonic functionalities.

To study these phenomena, we develop and apply advanced optical spectroscopy and microscopy techniques with simultaneous femtosecond temporal and nanometer spatial resolution. Using ultrafast laser pulses, we generate, manipulate, and probe electronic excitations in nanoscale materials. Our experimental approaches combine material and heterostructure fabrication, steady-state optical spectroscopy, ultrafast pump–probe measurements, and high-resolution transient absorption microscopy to directly visualize electronic, spin, and excitonic dynamics in space and time. Current research topics include ultrafast interlayer charge and energy transfer in van der Waals heterostructures, exciton and spin transport in two-dimensional semiconductors and ferroelectric materials, spin and valley dynamics in two-dimensional magnets, and nonlinear optical phenomena in low-dimensional quantum materials.