PhD: AI-assisted discovery of chiral perovskites in nanophotonic environments

Doctorat / PhD Type de contrat : TEMPORARY Date limite de candidature : 2026-11-28T16:50:03.297982+01:00

Work Activities AI-assisted discovery of chiral perovskite (quantum) emitters. You will leverage an AI-assisted materials optimization robot being developed at AMOLF as a route to rapid, closed-loop synthesis and characterization across large perovskite parameter spaces. You will optimize directly for figures of merit such as chirality, emission wavelength, brightness, and stability. Because optical excitation of perovskites can move atoms around, sculpting the optical field in time and space can enable programmable optical functions. By conducting approximately 1 million optical experiments in parallel using a spatial light modulator and hyperspectral camera, you will explore chemical and processing landscapes in days that would otherwise take a student a lifetime to cover systematically. Special attention will be paid to 2D and related low-dimensional perovskites, with the aim to understand if intrinsically strong material chirality is a necessary condition for reaching strong programmable chirality. Materials discovery in non-trivial optical environments. Building on the first thrust, you will introduce a new paradigm in optoelectronic device design: to synthesize and screen perovskite emitters directly on substrates that already provide a structured optical response. In a material that can be sculpted by the optical field, this provides the opportunity for a self-optimizing response – the local optical field imprints a symmetry on the material, which then amplifies the light-matter coupling. In the conventional workflow, one first finds a material with good intrinsic properties and only then designs the surrounding cavity, resonance, or metasurface. You will reverse that order, replacing an optically inert glass slide by a substrate with a designed resonance arising from refractive-index structuring (optical metasurface). Thin perovskite films spun onto such a substrate will respond most strongly when their emission (absorption) spectrum aligns with the photonic resonance. Likewise, if the figure of merit is chirality and the substrate itself has chiral optical response, one can search for materials whose intrinsic emission (absorption) couples most effectively to that environment. In this way, the optical structure of the substrate transforms the material on top into exactly what it needs for maximal performance. Such exploration offers tantalizing opportunities to study the impact of local versus nonlocal optical resonances in the context of material optimization. How does the spatial extent of the photonic resonance affect the material symmetry? Does the optical field profile induce spatially varying chiral properties in the perovskite? Understanding the coupling between photonic environment and material crystallization poses completely new opportunities in material synthesis for advanced photonic integration and…