Dorthe Eisele, from the CUNY Center for Discovery & Innovation's Department of Chemistry, will deliver a seminar entitled, "A Paradigm Shift Inspired by Nature: Robust Frenkel Excitons Despite Extreme Heat Stress." Hosted by Michael D. Ward.
For more information about Dorothe Eisele, click here.
Abstract: The future of sustainable energy technologies requires not only highly efficient but also robust light-harvesting (LH) materials, especially as rising global temperatures (i.e. increase of extreme weather events such as excessively high temperatures) threaten the efficiency of existing photovoltaic installations. Unlike current solar energy conversion technologies, natural photosynthetic organisms1 have clearly evolved beyond these challenges, capturing and transporting solar energy robustly and efficiently even under extreme environmental stress. Within photosynthetic organisms, delocalized Frenkel excitons—coherently-shared excitations among chromophores—are responsible for the remarkable efficiency of supramolecular LH assemblies. Clearly, supramolecular assemblies are Nature’s most successful material system for solar energy harvesting. However, the persistent limitations in translating nature’s design principles for applications in optoelectronic devices have been (1) the supramolecular structures’ fragility, and the Frenkel excitons’ delicate nature, especially (2) under elevated temperatures and (3) upon deposition onto solid substrates. In my talk, I will present proof-of-concept that the intrinsic barriers towards functionalization of supramolecular assemblies can finally be overcome; through in situ cage-like scaffolding of individual supramolecular LH nanotubes2, we designed highly stable supramolecular nanocomposites3 with discretely tunable (~4.7-5.0 nm), uniform (±0.3 nm), cage-like scaffolds. High-resolution cryo-TEM, spectroscopy, and near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) revealed supramolecular excitons within cage-like scaffolds are robust, even under extreme heat-stress. Complementary substrate studies on prototype dye-sensitized solar cells showed that our nanocomposites’ precise scaffold tunability in-solution was also maintained upon immobilization onto a solid substrate. Together, these results indicate that our novel supramolecular nanocomposite system is a successful, critical first step towards the development of practical bio-inspired LH materials for solar-energy conversion technologies as well as a basis for future fundamental investigations that were previously not possible, such as dilution of supramolecular assemblies required for single-molecule imaging or precise tunability of scaffold dimensions for controlled functionalization of hybrid model systems, i.e., plexcitonic systems.
[1] Orf, G.S. and Blankenship, R.E., Photosynth. Res., 2013; Scholes, G.D., et al. Nature Chem., 2011; [2] Eisele et al., Nature Chem. 2012; Eisele et al., JACS 2010; Eisele et al., Nature Nanotech. 2009; Eisele et al., PNAS 2014 [3] Eisele et. al. submitted, under review.
Biography: Dorthe was born and educated in Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental Physics from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, in close collaboration with David Vanden Bout (University of Texas at Austin, USA). She conducted her postdoctoral research at the EFRC Center for Excitonics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the research groups of Moungi Bawendi, Keith Nelson, Prof. Andrei Tokmakoff, and the late Prof. Robert Silbey. Dorthe is a proud member of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In Summer 2015, she received the keys to her laboratories at CCNY’s newly opened Science Research Complex. Especially as a junior faculty member, Dorthe is thankful for the generous support from her research community including the National Science Foundation CAREER Program (2018) or the Department of Energy Solar Photochemistry Program (2017). Funded through her NSF-MRI grant (2015), Dorthe’s near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM)—delivered and installed in June 2017—provides the key capability for CCNY’s Nano-imaging/Spectroscopy Laboratory, which is directed by her. With the creative conjunction of chemistry and physics laboratories, Dorthe’s cross-disciplinary research team simultaneously synthesizes and analyzes bio-inspired model systems for potential applications in fields such as Renewable Energy, Nanomedicine, or Information Technology. Specifically, the Eisele Research Group is focused on the fundamental science of well-defined self-assembled nanostructures that can interact with light with a particular interest in elucidating the complex interplay between structural and optical properties at the nanoscale.