Understanding of how the nanostructure materials such as quantum dots, nanowires, nanotubes, and graphene are grown from self-assembly of atoms and molecules and their fascinating new nanophysics remain as one of the unconquered frontier sciences. The low dimensional materials can be easily hybridized to reveal multifunctional performance, which has never been realized in conventional approaches. Recent progress in ideal two-dimensional layered structures such as graphene, boron nitride, metal oxide, and their hybridization with zero- and/or one-dimensional nanostructures has opened new exciting research areas in tunneling phenomena, enhanced carrier mobility, charge injection/extraction spectroscopy, thermoelectric, and photonic crystals. Nevertheless, growth control of nanostructures and design of such hybrid structures are very challenging and often difficult task to attain intuition from physics point of view. Because of this difficulty, researches in nanostructure materials cannot be done in a small laboratory scale and require interdisciplinary collaboration from various disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, materials science and engineering. Another difficulty arises from measurements. Since sizes of nanomaterials are supposed to be tiny, the signal to noise ratio is low so as to make it difficult to measure unless the resolution of apparatus is improved. Furthermore, hybrid nanostructures require multimodal measurement tools in order to reveal multifunctions. In this regard, it is necessary to develop a new system combined with several apparatus with high spatial resolution and high sensitivity. Molecular motion picture, is it a realizable possibility?
IBS Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics (CMSD), located in the Seoul campus of Korea University, emphasizes developments of novel time- and space-resolved spectroscopy techniques and their applications to chemically reactive and biologically important systems.
CMSD uses ultrashort duration pulses of light to generate stroboscopic movies of the molecular motions that lead to the chemical, biological, and physical transformations of condensed matter. We use a broad range of radiation sources to measure the dynamics of electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom in a wide range of systems, perform quantum chemical and molecular mechanical computations of dynamic systems in condensed phases, and develop novel linear and nonlinear optical imaging and microscopy technologies to monitor time-evolution of chemically and biologically reactive systems in real time.