Ben Cotts, PhD, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Middlebury College, published an article in Advanced Materials. The article, "Ultrafast Symmetry Control in Photoexcited Quantum Dots," is funded in part by a Department of Energy (DOE) EPSCoR Lab Partnership awarded to Dr. Cotts.

"This research demonstrates the power of teamwork in science, bringing together DOE scientists from SLAC and Argonne National Lab, synthetic experts from the University of Chicago, theorists from the Ma group at the University of Vermont, and spectroscopists from the Cotts lab at Middlebury College," said Dr. Cotts about the paper. "The success of this collaboration was made possible in part by the DOE EPSCoR program. This work represents an exciting step toward directly observing how atomic rearrangements in the excited state of nanocrystals can be tailored through synthetic approaches to enhance performance in applications like optoelectronics and thermoelectrics."

Dr. Cotts joined Middlebury in 2021 and received his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. He runs the Cotts Lab, which does research focused on finding new forms of abundant and affordable clean energy.

The research article is available online through the Wiley Online Library. To read the paper, click here.