Université de Fribourg

Mahan excitons in room-temperature methylammonium lead bromide perovskites

Palmieri, Tania ; Baldini, Edoardo ; Steinhoff, Alexander ; Akrap, Ana ; Kollár, Márton ; Horváth, Endre ; Forró, László ; Jahnke, Frank ; Chergui, Majed

In: Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 850

In a seminal paper, Mahan predicted that excitonic bound states can still exist in a semiconductor at electron-hole densities above the insulator-to-metal Mott transition. However, no clear evidence for this exotic quasiparticle, dubbed Mahan exciton, exists to date at room temperature. In this work, we combine ultrafast broadband optical spectroscopy and advanced many-body calculations to...

Université de Fribourg

Charge separation and carrier dynamics in donor-acceptor heterojunction photovoltaic systems

Teuscher, Joël ; Brauer, Jan C. ; Stepanov, Andrey ; Solano, Alicia ; Boziki, Ariadni ; Chergui, Majed ; Wolf, Jean-Pierre ; Rothlisberger, Ursula ; Banerji, Natalie ; Moser, Jacques-E.

In: Structural Dynamics, 2017, vol. 4, no. 6, p. 061503

Electron transfer and subsequent charge separation across donor-acceptor heterojunctions remain the most important areas of study in the field of third- generation photovoltaics. In this context, it is particularly important to unravel the dynamics of individual ultrafast processes (such as photoinduced electron transfer, carrier trapping and association, and energy transfer and relaxation),...

Université de Fribourg

Charge migration and charge transfer in molecular systems

Wörner, Hans Jakob ; Arrell, a), Christopher A. ; Banerji, Natalie ; Cannizzo, Andrea ; Chergui, Majed ; Das, Akshaya K. ; Hamm, Peter ; Keller, Ursula ; Kraus, Peter M. ; Liberatore, Elisa ; Lopez-Tarifa, Pablo ; Lucchini, Matteo ; Meuwly, Markus ; Milne, Chris ; Moser, Jacques-E. ; Rothlisberger, Ursula ; Smolentsev, Grigory ; Teuscher, Joël ; Bokhoven, Jeroen A. van ; Wenger, Oliver

In: Structural Dynamics, 2017, vol. 4, no. 6, p. 061508

The transfer of charge at the molecular level plays a fundamental role in many areas of chemistry, physics, biology and materials science. Today, more than 60 years after the seminal work of R. A. Marcus, charge transfer is still a very active field of research. An important recent impetus comes from the ability to resolve ever faster temporal events, down to the attosecond time scale. Such...

Université de Fribourg

Strongly bound excitons in anatase TiO₂ single crystals and nanoparticles

Baldini, Eduardo ; Chiodo, Letizia ; Dominguez, A. ; Palummo, M. ; Moser, S. ; Yazdi-Rizi, Meghdad ; Auböck, G. ; Mallett, Benjamin P. P. ; Berger, Helmuth ; Magrez, Arnaud ; Bernhard, Christian ; Grioni, M. ; Rubio, Angel ; Chergui, Majed

In: Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 13

Anatase TiO₂ is among the most studied materials for light-energy conversion applications, but the nature of its fundamental charge excitations is still unknown. Yet it is crucial to establish whether light absorption creates uncorrelated electron–hole pairs or bound excitons and, in the latter case, to determine their character. Here, by combining steady-state angle-resolved...