On May 1st, Wiebke Albrecht will start at AMOLF as tenure track group leader. Her research group Hybrid Nanosystems will be embedded in the Designer Matter research theme at AMOLF. With her group, Albrecht will investigate the interaction between different components in complex hybrid nanosystems, such as metal-semiconductor nanostructures. By combining advanced electron microscopy and single particle optical spectroscopy on the same nanoparticle, she will be able to unravel the interplay of morphology and underlying charge and energy transfer processes. The ultimate goal is to develop new concepts of hybrid architectures, responsive to external stimuli, with properties specifically tailored for applications in solar energy harvesting and quantum information processing.
During her PhD at the Soft Condensed Matter group headed by Prof. Alfons van Blaaderen at Utrecht University, Albrecht worked on laser modification and plasmonic properties of anisotropic metal nanoparticles. Afterwards, she moved to the Electron Microscopy for Material Science group at the University of Antwerp and worked on in situ nanoparticle transformations studied in 3D by electron tomography. With a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, which she partially conducted at the Single-Molecule Optics group of Prof. Michel Orrit at Leiden University, she could combine her interest in advanced electron microscopy and single particle optical spectroscopy.
