Mengxia Liu
Yale University, CT·Materials Science·Early-career
Light carries more than brightness. Its color and its polarization (the direction in which its electric field twists or oscillates) both hold useful information, but the instruments that read them are usually bulky and slow.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
chiral perovskites
hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites
chirality-induced spin selectivity
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- 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.
- Tailor the optical field inside detectors so that each wavelength generates charge at a different depth, and design device architectures that keep the electrical signals separable across optical inputs.
- Train a neural network to recover both the degree of circular polarization and the spectrum of incoming light from a single voltage sweep of a chiral perovskite photodetector.
- Test whether the orientation and strength of a molecule's chiral axis, rather than the crystal's overall symmetry, controls direction-dependent spin absorption, using spin pumping and ultrafast magneto-optical Kerr effect measurements.
- Synthesize a library of chiral hybrid semiconductors with tunable alignment between the chiral axis and the crystal screw axis, and develop chirality descriptors that link structure to spin behavior.
- Measure how energy carriers move between quantum-dot dopants and their crystalline semiconductor host, using photoemission spectroscopy, pump-probe spectroscopy and synchrotron X-ray scattering, to guide design of short-wave infrared emitters.
More about the research
The electron's spin, a tiny quantum magnetic property, could also be used to build electronics that use less power and give off less heat. This research builds semiconductors from solutions, a cheap and scalable way to make them, and studies how their structure controls light, charge and spin. Two projects use chiral hybrid perovskites. These crystals combine organic molecules with inorganic metal-halide units. Their structure has a 'handedness', like left and right hands, which can sort electrons by spin. A third project embeds quantum dots, tiny light-emitting crystals, inside crystalline semiconductors to make infrared light sources.
Why it matters
Compact detectors that read color and polarization at once could support secure optical communication, biological sensing and imaging without bulky optics. Spin devices that need no magnetic elements could make data storage, sensing and computing more energy-efficient. Short-wave infrared light sources made from solutions could help bring bioimaging, medical diagnosis, machine vision and communication into portable and wearable electronics. Today these sources depend on complex epitaxial fabrication.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Advancing intelligent circular spectropolarimeter with chiral perovskite heterostructures
NSF · Jun 2026 – May 2031
Collaborative Research: Unraveling Chirality-Induced Anisotropic Spin Transport in Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Semiconductors
NSF · Aug 2025 – Jul 2028
Understanding electronic transport and dynamics of quantum-dot-doped-semiconductor solids for infrared optoelectronics
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
Jun Liu
North Carolina State University, NC·Materials Science
Synthesize a library of chiral hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors in which the handedness of the organic cations, and their alignment with the crystal's screw axis, are systematically tuned.
Min Ouyang
University of Maryland, MD·Chemistry
Establish chemical principles for making ligand-free, all-inorganic chiral hybrid nanostructures that combine plasmonic, excitonic and spin functions in a single particle.
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
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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