A big welcome to Brandon Thomas who will be joining our group during Fall quarter to learn about Monte Carlo simulations!

It was terrific to have the opportunity to visit the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla today to tour some of their lab facilities and present a talk to some of their bright, young physics undergraduate students. It was a pleasure to interact with so many eager students and tell them about the work we do here in Eugene. Many thanks to my hosts at BUAP!

The lab’s work was showcased in a plenary talk at the International Conference on Surfaces, Materials, and Vacuum 2025 in Puebla, Mexico! A wonderful conference and a great opportunity to learn about the terrific materials science being done in Mexico. Many thanks to Uriel Balderas at UNAM for the invitation, Ciro Falcony at Cinvestav for introducing me at the talk, Luis Becerril for taking care of me during my visit, and members of the conference organizing committee including Abraham Meza Rocha at BUAP, Ateet Dutt at UNAM, Rosendo Lozada Morales at BUAP, and Salvador Carmona Tellez at BUAP.

Congrats to Alyssa on her first first-author publication, a conference proceeding for SPIE! The team, including co-authors Zach and Áine, report on the evolving composition of squaraine aggregates in thin films during their thermal annealing, showing how our single-shot transient absorption technique can be used as a filter to measure sub-populations of aggregates within a heterogeneous thin film. Great job, team!

Congratulations to Laila and Logan on the publication of their SPIE conference proceedings. Their paper discusses some preliminary results showing that the synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals is strongly influenced by the amount of polar surface available to the growing nanocrystals. Congrats to the team!

Many thanks to symposium organizers Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, Mahesh Hariharan, and Naomi Ginsberg for the invitation to present our work in a plenary lecture in ACS’s Global Virtual Symposium on Ultrafast Dynamics of Electronic Excited States in the Condensed Phase. The squaraine team’s work was well-received and we got some very thoughtful and useful ideas for new directions!

Congrats to Logan, whose work simulating halide segregation in mixed-halide perovskite nanocrystals was presented in the Organic and Hybrid Light Emitting Materials and Devices conference at SPIE today. Many thanks to Michael Crawford, who made the initial measurements that we are trying to explain, and Matthias Agne and Elana Cope for their assistance with DFT calculations. We are grateful to Tae-Woo Lee, Franky So, and Ji-Seon Kim for organizing the conference and for the invitation to share our work.

The results of the squaraines project, spearheaded by Zach and Alyssa, were well-received at SPIE in San Diego. Many thanks to Minjung Son and Loreta Muscarella for organizing the Physical Chemistry of Semiconductor Materials conference at SPIE and for the invitation to share our work.

Congrats to Zach and Racheal, whose latest work, Morphology-Dependent Excited-State Dynamics of Squaraine Thin Films during Thermal Annealing was published today in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. This work demonstrates how SSTA and global fitting techniques can be used to disentangle the electronic structure and dynamics of different polymer morphologies within a heterogeneous thin film. They were able to use these tools to discover how the rate and amount of charge transfer changes during the thermal annealing of a model polymeric electron donor, P3HT, with an electron acceptor, PCBM. Great work, Zach and Racheal!

The nanocrystals sub-group had a terrific time at Nanocrystals Northwest this year, with Logan and Laila presenting posters and Cathy presenting a talk showcasing Logan’s latest and greatest research results! It was a great experience for Jeffrey and our REU student, Gwyn, as well. Thank you to the conference organizers, Brandi Cossairt, Dan Gamelin, Mark Hendricks, Kelly Olenyik, and Alina Schimpf for putting together such a great conference.