Abstract: Understanding thermal transport and light-matter interactions at the extreme scales is both fundamentally important and practically relevant. Studying these regimes often demand new instrumentation and high-resolution sensing techniques. In this talk, I will present my lab’s efforts to explore the complex landscape of heat transport and nanophotonics at the atomic and single-molecule scale. Specifically, we have developed microfabricated scanning thermal microscopes with picowatt- and sub-picowatt sensitivity and atomic spatial resolution. These tools have enabled us to uncover previously inaccessible thermal phenomena, including the quantum of electronic heat conductance, coherent phonon transport through single molecules, and most recently, the first direct observation of destructive phonon interference at the molecular level. Further, I will also discuss our recent work on single-crystal plasmonic optoelectronic platforms featuring atomically precise nanophotonic structures. These systems allow us to probe hot-carrier physics with unprecedented resolution and support the development of ultra-sensitive photoelectronic detectors.
a joint institute of 
and 
and