Min Ouyang
University of Maryland, MD·Chemistry
Chirality, or handedness, is the property that makes your left and right hands mirror images that cannot be stacked on each other. It appears everywhere, from DNA to optical materials.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
chirality
chiral nanomaterials
inorganic nanostructures
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Establish chemical principles for making ligand-free, all-inorganic chiral hybrid nanostructures that combine plasmonic, excitonic and spin functions in a single particle.
- Determine how chirality is induced, transmitted and controlled across interfaces between different inorganic materials, using nanomaterial synthesis, structural characterization and computational modeling.
- Measure how structural handedness affects charge transfer and spin polarization, using ultrafast optical spectroscopy and spin-resolved measurements.
- Test how chirality-induced spin-selective charge transfer influences photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical reactions, to build predictive structure–chirality–function design rules.
More about the research
This project asks whether handedness can be deliberately built into inorganic nanostructures, tiny particles of metals or semiconductors, and used to steer how electrons, their spins and chemical reactions behave. Understanding this could open routes to more efficient solar energy conversion, greener chemical manufacturing and computing based on electron spin.
Why it matters
Design rules for chiral inorganic nanomaterials could help engineers build more efficient solar-energy converters and light-driven catalysts for greener chemical manufacturing. Controlling electron spin with material handedness could also inform future quantum information and spin-based electronics, by offering new ways to create and move spin-polarized states in solid materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tianquan Lian
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Chemistry
Extend electron spin lifetimes in semiconductor nanoplatelets by increasing electron–hole separation in three-component nanoplatelet heterostructures (crystals built from layered materials), then use the best structures as donors.
Mengxia Liu
Yale University, CT·Materials Science·Early-career
Design chiral hybrid perovskite heterostructures that boost spin polarization dependent on light's handedness and improve spin-to-charge conversion under broadband circularly polarized light.
Wanyi Nie
University at Buffalo, NY·Materials Science
Grow and characterize heterostructures of chiral hybrid perovskites and 2D transition metal dichalcogenides to study interlayer excitons, electron–hole pairs spanning the interface.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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