Solar cells and printable LEDs are held back by a hidden problem: the way electrons and vibrations inside soft materials get tangled together, creating hybrid states that are hard to measure and control. This research tackles a fundamental gap in materials science. Current techniques cannot track these hybrid states while a device is actually running. The team has spent eight years developing new ultrafast spectroscopy methods that can watch charge dynamics unfold in working nanodevices. They now plan to combine those methods with coherent multidimensional spectroscopy and nanoprobe platforms to map hybrid states in real time, revealing how electronic and vibrational levels mix and evolve. If successful, this work will give engineers a practical toolkit to deliberately tune material properties—adjusting the density of electronic and vibrational states and their couplings. That could lead to photovoltaics with higher open-circuit voltage, printable emissive materials for flexible displays, and more efficient solar fuel devices. The research is fundamental in nature, aimed at mechanistic understanding rather than immediate commercial products. But past breakthroughs in ultrafast spectroscopy have directly enabled technologies from fibre-optic communications to laser surgery, so a deeper grasp of hybrid states could quietly reshape how soft optoelectronic materials are designed.
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A central challenge in the development of modern optoelectronic materials is the ability to characterise and control their electronic and structural dynamics with high time resolution and spatial selectivity. This is increasingly important for solution processable 'soft' nanomaterials where the electronic and structural dynamics are highly entangled and time dependent. This entanglement leads to the hybridisation of different electronic and vibrational levels and the emergence of new states that ultimately determine the materials' optoelectronic properties and play the key role in a range of processes from charge photogeneration and exciton fission to the localisation and multiplication of electronic states. A technology capable of characterising hybrid states operando would be indispensable for material engineering and device development. In the last 8 years, my team has exposed the role of hybridisation between electronic and vibrational states in a range of soft electronic nanomaterials. We have also developed a new set of methods for the ultrafast spectroscopy of nanodevices at working conditions. This brings us in a unique position to combine this expertise with recent developments in coherent multidimensional spectroscopies and versatile nanoprobe platforms, to develop a novel toolkit for time-resolved operando mapping of charge dynamics in optoelectronic materials, including the evolution hybrid states and their molecular origins. This will open new possibilities in engineering material properties by the targeted adjustments of the densities of electronic and vibrational states, interstate couplings and structural dynamics. These findings will bring a new mechanistic understanding of electronic processes in soft molecular materials and can have direct consequences for the practical applications, including the development of photovoltaics with high open-circuit voltage, emissive printable materials, or efficient and robust solar fuel devices.
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