Our director Mauro Nisoli along with Fernando Martín (IMDEA and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Nazario Martín (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) have been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant, offering almost 12 million Euro of funding over 6 years. Of these, our laboratories will be allocated 5 million.
The TOMATTO project (the ultimate time scale in organic molecular opto-electronics, the attosecond) will explore what happens within individual molecules immediately after interaction with light. This is uncharted territory, since light gives rise to events that are not readily accessible, happening as they do in extremely short time scales, in the order of attoseconds (that is, a few billionths of billionths of a second). To this end, a new leading-edge attosecond laboratory will be built at the Attosecond Research Center.
The research conducted within the scope of TOMATTO, coordinated by a team of experts in laser technologies, in the synthesis of new organic materials and in computational methods, aims to film the light-induced motion of electrons in molecules with an unprecedented temporal resolution. The end goal is to engineer the molecular response in order to be able to produce materials with improved opto-electronic characteristics.
Press release:
https://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2020-synergy-grants-results