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Highlights and Latest News

Emma Bartelsen and Trey Long have accepted NREIP positions

Mar. 7, 2024—Emma Bartelsen and Trey Long have accepted NREIP positions working under Dr. Jeremy Robinson at NRL in Washington, DC this summer. This will involve upgrading hardware and performing programing work to automate 2D material identification and transfer. This involves identifying the orientation of the flake facets, aligning with an underlying sample to orient the flakes...

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Nanoscale Horizons HOT Papers designation

Feb. 15, 2024—“Role of carboxylates in the phase determination of metal sulfide nanoparticles” was selected by the Editors as a 2024 Nanoscale Horizons HOT article.          

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Josh Caldwell elected as Optica and SPIE fellow

Feb. 1, 2024—Josh Caldwell was elected to the 2024 class of Optica Fellows and SPIE Fellows. Optica https://www.optica.org/get_involved/awards_and_honors/fellow_members/elected_fellows/ SPIE https://spie.org/membership/member-recognition/spie-fellows#_=_  

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Congratulations to Katja Diaz-Granados!

Dec. 20, 2023—This past week Katja Diaz-Granados successfully completed her qualifying exam. Her research has focused on exploring the role of crystal symmetry for controlling both thermal emission and the propagation characteristics of polaritons. Before graduating, she hopes to extend the use of the lab’s nano-optic probing techniques to the field of art conservation, where efforts to...

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Caldwell group awarded an FY24 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program grant

Dec. 19, 2023—The Caldwell group was recently awarded an FY24 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program grant to purchase several upgrades to the nano-optic probes housed within the laboratory. The grant provides funding to upgrade the existing scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscope (s-SNOM) and nano-FTIR metrology suite present in his laboratory at Vanderbilt University to enable s-SNOM mapping...

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Josh Caldwell Plenary Lecture at AVS 69

Dec. 15, 2023—Josh Caldwell gave the Plenary Lecture at AVS 69 on November 6, 2023 Exploiting and Controlling Lattice Symmetry and Strong Coupling for Infrared Nanophotonics and Ultrafast Thermal Transport

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Caldwell Earns Prestigious Office of Naval Research MURI Grant

Sep. 18, 2023—The Caldwell group, in collaboration with the Dionne, Heinz, Jornada (all of Stanford University), Low (Minnesota), and Folland (Iowa) labs were awarded a prestigious Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the Office of Naval Research to generalize our understanding of twist-optics and moire phenomena in misoriented layers of two-dimensional materials, metasurfaces and low-symmetry crystalline systems....

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Congratulations to Mingze He for completing his PhD!

Sep. 4, 2023—Congratulations to Dr. He for successfully completing his PhD!

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Congratulations to Guanyu Lu for successfully defending his Ph.D.!

Aug. 28, 2023—Congratulations to Dr. Lu for successfully completing his PhD on March 1, 2023 with a defense titled “Phonon Polaritons for Engineering Thermal Emission and Heat Transfer.”

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Ryan Kowalski and Levi Hoogendoorn gave Poster presentations at MRS spring!

Apr. 14, 2023—Ryan Kowalski and Levi Hoogendoorn gave Poster presentations at MRS spring 2023 at San Francisco!

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Congratulations to Joseph Matson for successfully defending his Ph.D.!

Dec. 5, 2022—Congratulations to Dr. Matson! Joseph successfully presented his Ph.D. dissertation defense “Gaining Nanophotonic Control through Crystalline Anisotropy” this afternoon.

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Congratulations to Ryan Kowalski for the VINSE spotlight publication!

Nov. 28, 2022—“Mid- to Far-Infrared Anisotropic Dielectric Function of HfS2 and HfSe2” published in Advanced Optical Materials, selected as a VINSE Spotlight Publication.   About the author: Ryan Kowalski is a fourth-year graduate student pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Materials Science under the direction Dr. Josh Caldwell. Using infrared spectroscopy, the Caldwell group investigates the optical properties of...

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The group participated in VINSE NanoDay!

Nov. 7, 2022—Last week, the group participated in the 22nd Annual Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Forum NanoDay, which featured a keynote from Prof. Dmitri Basov. In the afternoon, Josh gave a talk about “Exploring the Role of Anisotropy and Strong Coupling in Driving Infrared Nanophotonics”. All the group members presented posters during the NanoDay poster competition, including two first-year...

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Check out our new collaborative work with Justus Ndukaife’s group!

Oct. 12, 2022—Our recent collaborative work with Justus Ndukaife’s  group demonstrates a novel approach to engineering quasi-bound states in the continuum (quasi-BIC) by introducing slots into a zigzag array of elliptical silicon resonators. The electric field intensity enhancement near the apex and the quality factor of the quasi-BIC resonance are both increased. The demonstration holds enormous potential in partial trapping, sensing,...

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Check out Ryan Kowalski and Ryan Nolen’s paper on the infrared dielectric function of Hf-based TMDs!

Sep. 7, 2022—Our recent work on the infrared dielectric function of Hf-based transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) was just published in Advanced Optical Materials! In this work, we extract the mid- to far-infrared dielectric function of HfS2 and HfSe2, which have exceptionally large Reststrahlen bands that extend throughout the far-infrared. In collaboration with the Stephanie Law’s group (U...

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