Carlos Silva

Professor

Education

B.A., Luther College, 1992; Ph.D, University of Minnesota, 1998; Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge, 1998-2001

Research

The Silva group is interested in understanding how excited states are created and how they evolve in complex materials of interest in optoelectronics. In order to achieve this understanding, we use advanced optical spectroscopic techniques, both time-resolved using ultrafast laser pulses, as well as quasi-steady-state methods. Our core research focus centers around photoexcitation dynamics in organic, polymeric, and hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors. With our ultrafast techniques, we can measure transient photoinduced absorption and luminescence, as well as nonlinear optical response of matter via coherent multidimensional spectroscopy. We are also interested in exploiting the quantum-mechanical nature of light, namely photon entanglement, to study with intricate selectivity how photoexcited states in matter correlate with one another. We are a diverse and multidisciplinary group, composed of students and postdocs with formal training in chemistry, physics, and materials science.