New projects & Milestones

The main goal of the recently established (October 2018) Ultrafast Dynamics in Nanoscale Systems Group is to probe, understand and exploit ultrafast phenomena that take place at the nanoscale. These phenomena have far-reaching implications in terms of material and system properties, as well as technological applications in fields such as thermal management, light harvesting, photodetection, data communication and quantum technologies.

Currently, one of the main material systems under investigation is that of two-dimensional, layered materials and hybrid Van der Waals heterostructures. In particular, the group studies the exciting interplay between different carriers of energy/heat/information in these systems, such as photons, electrons, phonons, spins and other (quasi-)particles.

Since the group was established only recently, many efforts have been put into setting up the laboratory, which is now fully operational and generating data! Meanwhile, the group has expanded significantly during 2020, with several new PhD students, postdocs and undergraduate students joining it.

A significant effort of the research in the group takes place within the framework of the ERC Starting Grant project “CUHL” (Controlling Ultrafast Heat in Layered materials), which was awarded to Dr. Tielrooij at the end of 2018. The group also led the BIST Ignite project “2DNanoHeat” (awarded in March 2018) on heat transport in novel quantum materials, including topological insulators, which is now an ongoing collaboration between various ICN2 groups and ICFO. In 2020, the group was awarded a project by the Spanish Ministry of Science, “STEAMY”, which is a joint experimental-computational effort towards understanding and steering heat flow in 2D materials.

During 2019 and 2020, the group has been working on several projects related to nonlinear optics in the terahertz (THz) regime, using 2D materials. As part of this research, the group was granted several beamtimes at the TELBE facility of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Germany).

In 2020, the group started a new collaborative project with IFAE, “2DetMIPs”, funded via a BIST Ignite award, which has the aim to use 2D materials for the detection of minimum-ionizing particles in high-energy physics experiments.