My work is focused on two-dimensional and highly luminescent metal chalcogenide nanoplatelets based on cadmium. The emphasis is on the synthesis plus characterization of the nanoplatelets as well as on a variety of cooperative projects to bring the nanocrystals closer to various practical applications ranging from the fields of physics to biology.

This includes two projects with the aim of developing fiber lasers with nanoplatelets as the active medium. On the one hand, we are investigating the filling of a dispersion of liquid nanoplatelets into the hollow core of hollow-core glass fibers for an optically excited laser. Once demonstrated, this concept could form a flexible laser platform by choosing different nanoplatelets with different emission wavelengths. In another approach, we use uniformly aligned nanoplatelets in polymer fibers as the basis for another laser platform.

In another project, we want to use the narrow emission bands of 2D materials to enable more efficient encoding of biomarkers for flow cytometry. To this end, I am mainly working on embedding various nanoparticles in polymer microspheres in order to utilize their photoluminescence for this application.