Events

Date: 10 June 2025   Time: 11:30 - 12:30

Location: Graduate Centre GC114 + Online

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Summary

An inherently powerful tool to study liquid water is terahertz (THz) radiation because it can reveal the sub-ps fluctuations of the water network: radiation between about 1 and 25 THz is strongly absorbed by intermolecular collective modes of hydrogen-bonded water molecules, which can be thought of as "small and short-lived phonons". The talk is divided into two parts. In the first part I will describe a novel approach, dubbed "intense THz time-domain spectroscopy", to probe the subtle variations of the water modes due to the interaction of the liquid molecules with different solutes [1]. In the second part, I will discuss how to trigger and detect photo-ionization processes in pure water and salt solutions, that is, how liquid water responds to additional excess charge carriers like electrons [2-4].

[1] Terahertz spectroscopy of thick and diluted water solutions Opt. Exp. 32 11041 (2024)
[2] The birth and evolution of solvated electrons in the water PNAS 120 e2216480120 (2023)
[3] High-Mobility Electrons in Aqueous Iodide Solutions ACS Omega 10 5097 (2025)
[4] An ultra-fast liquid switch for terahertz radiation APL Photonics 7 121302 (2022)

Biography

Fabio Novelli earned his PhD in nonlinear optics and condensed matter Physics in 2013 from the University of Trieste (Italy) under the supervision of Fulvio Parmigiani and Daniele Fausti. From 2014 to 2016 he worked on multidimensional coherent effects in light-harvesting proteins with Jeff Davis at Swinburne University, Australia. From 2017 to 2022 he investigated aqueous solu-tions with Martina Havenith at Ruhr University, Germany. Since 2023, he has been Principal In-vestigator on an Individual Research Grant (DFG) exploring the conductivity of gold nanoparticles suspensions. He was recently appointed as Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Southampton, UK.