Amin Reihani
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Metal nanoparticles can use light to speed up chemical reactions, which makes them useful catalysts in chemical manufacturing. It is still unclear how they do this.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
nanoscale heat transfer
non-equilibrium transport
electro-thermal transport
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Map electron and lattice (phonon) temperatures separately within individual metal nanoparticles under plasmonic light excitation, using Two-Temperature Scanning Thermal Microscopy with nanometer resolution.
- Quantify the nanoscale heat source density, the electron–phonon coupling rate, and the interfacial thermal resistance between nanoparticles and their supporting substrates, which together control how heat leaves the particle.
- Determine how multi-particle interactions, near-field coupling, and geometric and quantum confinement affect energy transport and local temperature rise in nanoparticles.
- Tailor nanoparticle geometry and support interfaces to steer energy flow, and link the resulting electro-thermal transport to photocatalytic reaction rates through reaction kinetics measurements.
More about the research
The reaction might be driven by ordinary heating of the particle, or by high-energy electrons created when light strikes it. Telling these two mechanisms apart could lead to catalysts that use sunlight more efficiently and give better control over which products form.
Why it matters
Light-driven catalysts could make chemical manufacturing and energy conversion more efficient, but designers do not yet know whether hot electrons or ordinary heat drive these reactions. Quantitative maps of nanoscale heating could guide the design of sunlight-powered catalysts that give more efficient reactions and better control over products. The same framework could inform future energy conversion materials and microelectronics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
Asegun Henry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Engineering
Advance understanding of phonon transport, the atomic vibrations that carry heat, in disordered materials whose atoms lack a regular repeating arrangement, using advanced computational approaches.
Jivtesh Garg
University of Oklahoma, OK·Engineering
Test whether evanescent electric fields across 2–4 Å interfacial gaps help acoustic phonons, the lattice vibrations that carry heat, cross GaN–diamond interfaces, using atomistic Green's function calculations.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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