Laura's research interests

The research in my PhD and post-doc involve investigation of ultrafast charge and exciton dynamics in semiconducting systems and heterostructures.

Aim of my PhD was to gain insight on the exciton formation and diffusion dynamics and charge separation, trapping and transfer at a functional interface, after interaction with light. To address these questions I developed a setup for electronic sum-frequency generation (e-SFG) spectroscopy, a 2^nd order non-linear optical technique where the energy of the light pulses was chosen to be resonant with valence electronic transitions. Moreover, to gain a fully comprehensive picture of the investigated systems, I combined the background free, fully resonant e-SFG with broadband fs transient transmission spectroscopy using compressed white-light pulses.

Currently, as a postdoc in the EIS group at FERMI, I am pursuing experimental schemes that would allow to combine the above-mentioned techniques with the chemical specificity intrinsic of XUV and SXR radiation, through the excitation of atomic core resonances. In particular I wish to exploit the unprecedented brilliance and coherence of FERMI together with the non-collinearity of the TIMER and mini-TIMER setups, to design second-order, surface, interface and chemical specific experimental techniques.

Finally, as a member of the EIS group, I put my expertise in ultrafast laser systems and time-resolved spectroscopy at disposals of the external users at the TIMEX, TIMER and DiProI endstation.