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.
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.