Dr Jenny Clark

Jenny received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Cambridge where she worked primarily with Professor Carlos Silva and Professor Frank Spano on the photophysics of poly(3-hexylthiophene) thin films.

She then moved to Milan to work with Professor Guglielmo Lanzani on ultrafast all-optical switching in organic plastic optical fibres. During this time, she developed an interest in organic photonics and in the study of ultrafast internal conversion and conformational reorganisation.

University of Sheffield staff profile

Following a few months as a visiting scholar at the University of Hyderabad, in 2009 she moved back to Cambridge as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin fellow, winning a Charles and Catherine Darwin fellowship the following year. There she worked on understanding singlet exciton fission in acenes and carotenoids as well as returning to study the photophysics of thiophene-containing polymers.

In 2013-14 she moved to the University of Sheffield to take up a VC advanced fellowship.

Jenny uses ultrafast time-resolved and steady-state spectroscopy to study organic materials. Below is a photograph of a transient absorption experiment. In this picture, the laser beams are made up of ultrashort (~100fs) pulses 1ms apart.

The different colours are generated through non-linear processes such as non-collinear optical parametric amplification. The pulses can be compressed to the near the transform limit of ~10fs allowing measurement of electronic processes occurring on the femtosecond time-scale.

Above: Transient absorption (or pump-probe) experiment. The pump beam is in green, the two probe beams are in yellow. Photo courtesy of Sebastian, Kerr, Simon, Mark.