ERC Consolidator Grant: Efficient transport of excited-state energy is an essential ingredient for all light-harvesting technologies. Energy transport characteristics have traditionally been derived from transient spectroscopy or device-level characterization techniques. While such techniques work well for the characterization of the spatially homogeneous lattices of crystalline semiconductors, they fail to capture the spatially varying complexity of nanostructured semiconductors.

Motivated by this challenge, a number of powerful Transient Microscopy (TM) techniques have emerged in recent years, allowing for the first time for a direct visualization of energy transport in both space and time. These studies have revealed a wide range of anomalous diffusion dynamics in nanostructured semiconductors, indicating a strong dominance of energetic disorder. Importantly though, current implementations of TM lack the ability to directly and quantifiably address energetic disorder and studies have therefore been limited to qualitative observations and phenomenological modelling. As a result, key questions remain about the potential roles of static and dynamic disorder in determining the energy transport characteristics and the potential role of defects in driving energy interconversion.

To answer these questions and fully unravel the role of energetic disorder in the energy transport characteristics of nanostructured semiconductors, EnVision will develop Hyperspectral Transient Microscopy (HTM) – the first technique capable of simultaneously visualizing energy transport in space, time, and energy.

Through the direct correlation between energy transport and energetic disorder, EnVision will allow us to unambiguously determine the role of energetic disorder in the energy transport characteristics of nanostructured semiconductors, defining new formalisms for disorder-driven energy transport, and guiding the design of optimized energy landscapes for light harvesting with nanomaterials.