Physical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Andrés Montoya-Castillo, University of Colorado Boulder
About the Seminar
"Deciphering & controlling the mechanisms of energy flow across materials"
Spectroscopy and microscopy have the potential to reveal the structure and dynamics of complex materials, ranging from chromophores in solution to molecular aggregates, nanomaterials, and even quantum sensors. Yet, disentangling these signals and extracting an intuitive picture of how excitations form, move, and transform is one of the most persistent challenges in physical chemistry. In this talk, I will offer three vignettes on our work developing and applying approaches to predict, measure, and understand how light-matter interactions can reveal the mechanisms of energy flow that set the stage for controlled energy harvesting and quantum sensing. Specifically, I will discuss the challenge of describing small polaron formation, relaxation, and transport in materials like transition metal oxides. I will then show how judiciously formulated dimensionality reduction can help enable 2D spectroscopy-based microscopy to track energy flow in molecular systems, like ionic liquid electrolytes in model batteries. Finally, I will illustrate how we can build fast and accurate algorithms to extract signals from quantum noise—signals that reveal structure and dynamics in the quantum world and which promise an exciting future for quantum sensing technology.
About the Speaker
Andres Montoya-Castillo obtained his BA in chemistry and literature with a minor in physics. He obtained his PhD in Chemical Physics from Columbia University, working with Prof. David Reichman, and then did his postdoc at Stanford University in the group of Prof. Thomas Markland. He started his independent career at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021.
Andres's research centers on developing and applying methods to capture and control the dynamics of energy, charge, and information flow in complex condensed phase environments, understanding the conformational changes underlying slow biophysical transformations, and designing theoretical and computational approaches to optimize spectroscopic and quantum sensing protocols and interpret the data they produce. He and his group have made contributions in fields ranging from biophysics to energy conversion and quantum information. Andres’s work has been recognized with the DOE Early Career and NSF CAREER Awards, the Marinus Smith mentoring award, and he is a Scialog, Sloan, and Packard Fellow.