The use of light to understand detailed electronic structure and chemical properties of a molecule through light-matter interaction is fundamentally essential to design and analyze any chemical system. Over the past decades, rapid developments on optics and laser techniques improved the detection efficiency of multiphoton processes with more detailed chemical...
Proteins are known to have diverse biomedical functions and excellent catalytic performance; however, they are also fragile outside living cells, challenging their use in industrial applications. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly porous crystalline materials that consist of metal cluster nodes and organic linkers. With their rigid structures, MOFs can effectively...
Noble metal nanoparticles (NPs) have shown promise as imaging agents, drug delivery platforms, and plasmonic sensors. Anisotropic gold NPs, such as gold nanostars, have particularly received attention due to their shape-dependent optical and spectral properties. With their 3D anisotropic structure with branches protruding into different directions and high surface areas,...
Recent progress in the field of nanomaterials has enabled significant advances in optoelectronic devices such as solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photocatalysts, and sensors. Nanoparticles feature superior optical and electronic properties that arise from quantum confinement and therefore cannot be attained used bulk materials. However, further developments in the field of...
Metallic conductivity and broken inversion symmetry were long thought to be contraindicated properties, under the assumption that long-range Coulombic interactions (screened by free charge carriers) were necessary for coordinated polar displacements. Within the past decade, the discovery of polar metals has prompted a rethinking of the relationship between metallicity and...
This thesis describes the synthesis and photophysical characterization of low-dimensionalmaterials—including thin-film semiconductors, colloidal quantum dots, and molecules—with the
broader motivation of integrating them into mixed-dimensional heterostructures with novel
responses to external stimuli. Due to their high surface area to volume ratio and incomplete
dielectric screening, mixed-dimensional heterostructures have high sensitivity...
Nanoparticles (NPs) are emerging as attractive drug carriers in therapeutic and diagnostic applications. The physiochemical properties of NPs, such as particle size, shape, and surface chemistry, play important roles in the functions of engineered nanoconstructs−NP cores with surface ligands. Recent work has screened these properties by monitoring cellular uptake and/or...
The building blocks of life are proteins. These incredible nanostructures are responsible for forming the diverse infrastructure of living systems and for performing countless biological functions. In Nature, these materials and systems achieve structural complexity and function through highly regulated and controlled assembly of protein building blocks, driven by specific...
Oligonucleotides can be used to modulate the regulation of pathological genes that are associated with various diseases. However, due to biological barriers, efficient delivery of oligonucleotides, especially to extrahepatic tissues, remains a challenge. To overcome these barriers, multiple delivery strategies have been developed, ranging from medicinal chemistry to nanotechnology. Nanoparticle-based...
Nanoparticle synthesis is capable of producing particles with any combination of structure, chemistry, size, shape, and surface. All of the different combinations of these physical properties can produce nanoparticles with almost countless materials properties suited for many applications. Given this interest in using nanoparticles in so many different fields, including...