Abstract:  I will present results in which we have placed semiconducting carbon nanotube thin films in between two highly reflective mirrors to create excitonic polaritons. The intensity of light inside cavities like these are so strong that the excitons on different nanotubes become coupled to one another, creating spatially delocalized wavefunctions. We have created a cavity made of carbon nanotubes in which we have purposely added energetic disorder by using two different bandgaps of nanotubes. We spatially separated the nanotubes by 200 nm, and show that energy flows from one to the other, which we model with Redfield theory.  I will discuss how these ideas might be extended to control exciton transfer in light harvesting devices.

Bio:  Martin T. Zanni is the Meloche-Bascom Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley, working with Dan Neumark, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with Robin Hochstrasser. He is one of the early pioneers of 2D IR spectroscopy and has made many technological innovations that has broadened the capabilities and scope for a wide range of multidimensional spectroscopies and microscopies. He utilizes these new techniques to study topics in biophysics, chemical physics, photovoltaics, and surfaces. He founded PhaseTech Spectroscopy Inc., which is the first company to commercialize 2D IR and 2D Electronic spectroscopies. He has received many national and international accolades for his research. Notably, he was recently elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, yet to be announced, he is the 2022 recipient of the Lippincott Award from the OSA.