Dr. Wanyi Nie
Optoelectronics Materials
& Devices physics group
Research
Current Research Topics​​
Semiconductors for high energy photon sensing
Radiation detectors are core technologies for medical imaging, security screening, crystallography and other non-destructive diagnostic tools. A low cost, high performance semiconductor to convert high energy photon to electron is currently missing.
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We are investigating novel semiconductors that can sense, capture radiation photons and radioactive materials and deliver charge signals from our materials.
Chiral semiconductors for spintronics
Nature smartly utilize molecules with broken mirror symmetry, namely chiral molecules, to selectively guide the synthesis of protein with high accuracy.
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We can make chiral semiconductors with broken mirror symmetrys to selectively detect particles (such as photon, electron) with different angular momentum.
We are interested in understanding the chiral induced selectivity properties in chiral semiconductors, and we will integrate them in optoelectronic devices.
Photonic sources for lighting devices
2D halide perovskites are solution grown quantum wells exhibiting near 100 % photoluminescence quantum yield. However, the bright phase are thermodynamically unstable. We are investigating their phase instability and looking for an approach to stablize the phase.
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On the other hand, we are also interested in the dynamic nature of the lattice. Upon external trigger, we observed a photo emission response that is self-healable once the trigger is removed. We call it a "reconfigurable material" that can be potentially used for photonic memory.
Semiconductors for space
We are looing at semiconductors suitable for harsh envrionment. Space envrionment is one of them!
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The science questions we are interested in include:
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- What are the material properties (optical, electronic, spin polarizations) under extreme envrionment
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- What structures determine their properties when operating in space
Funding
We gratefully acknowledge the following sponsors for their support:
