Stephan Link

About

Professor Stephan Link is the Charles W. and Genevieve M. Walton Endowed Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on coupled nanostructures, hybrid plasmonic interfaces, and the dynamics of plasmon, hot carrier, and exciton decay. He is involved in exploring the fundamental mechanisms and applications of these nanostructures in various scientific and technological contexts.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Nanotechnology
• Optoelectronics
• Physics
• Optics
• Molecular physics
• Chemistry
• Chemical physics
• Atomic physics
• Computer Science

Selected publications

• Bottom-up carbon dots: purification, single-particle dynamics, and electronic structure

  Chemical Science · 2025-01-01 · 49 citations

  reviewOpen access

  -networked carbon and core-surface energy transfer, and heterogeneities, due to the unpredictable location of heteroatoms and often non-crystalline structure. Here we focus our review on three aspects of these systems: (1) coupling characterization with bottom-up synthesis to identify and remove confounding byproducts such as small molecules or hydrogen-rich polymers; (2) single-particle characterization to obtain unambiguous information on carbon dots and highlight the distribution of propertie…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Single-Particle Correlated Imaging Reveals Multiple Chromophores in Carbon Dot Fluorescence

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025-05-16 · 12 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Carbon dots are remarkable nanomaterials with many applications, but the sources of their emission are still uncertain. Carbon dots exhibit complex behaviors such as excitation-dependent emission due to their heterogeneous composition and structure. Most studies have been carried out on the ensemble level, where sample heterogeneity remains hidden. Understanding the complex emission of carbon dots requires single-particle measurements. Here, we determined that for red-emitting carbon dots made f…

  PublisherDOI

• Chemical Interface Damping Revealed by Single-Particle Absorption Spectroscopy

  ACS Nano · 2025-03-04 · 12 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Plasmon-induced interfacial charge separation is a promising way to efficiently extract energetic carriers through direct plasmon decay. This mechanism of charge transfer has been investigated by single-particle scattering spectroscopy, which measures the homogeneous plasmon line width. The line width is broadened by charge transfer, generally known as chemical interface damping. However, conflicting reports exist regarding the effect of chemical interface damping on the corresponding single-par…

  PublisherDOI

• Plasmonic pathway to hybrid nanomaterials through energy transfer

  Science Advances · 2025-10-10 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Plasmon-induced resonance energy transfer (PIRET) is a promising approach for plasmonic photocatalysis and energy conversion, but challenges include elucidating the mechanism and maximizing its efficiency, both of which are hampered by competing processes. Another challenge is demonstrating that PIRET can photoinitiate reactions that follow efficient pathways compared to bulk processes. We report a plasmon-induced route to plasmonic-polymer hybrid nanomaterials using in operando single-particle…

  PublisherDOI

• Machine Learning to Adaptively Predict Gold Nanorod Sizes on Different Substrates

  The Journal of Physical Chemistry C · 2025-03-18 · 4 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Correlating a nanoparticle’s morphology with its optical properties is essential and is achieved by a combination of electron microscopy and optical spectroscopy. Machine learning has gained attention for enhancing in situ measurements and enabling inverse nanoparticle design. However, new training data for each specific condition are often required when testing data differ from training data. We propose a method to adapt existing training data for predicting the size of gold nanorods (AuNRs) on…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• DMREF: Collaborative Research: Nanoscale Temperature Manipulation via Plasmonic Fano Interferences

  NSF · $563k · 2017–2022

• COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: DMREF: Designing Plasmonic Nanoparticle Assemblies For Active Nanoscale Temperature Control By Exploiting Near- And Far-Field Coupling

  NSF · $612k · 2021–2024

• Chiral Plasmonics at the Single Nanoparticle and Single Molecule Level

  NSF · $428k · 2015–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Wei‐Shun Chang

  University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

  101 shared

• Christy F. Landes

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  74 shared

• Mostafa A. El‐Sayed

  University of Glasgow

  48 shared

• Peter Nordlander

  Rice University

  43 shared

• Naomi J. Halas

  Rice University

  29 shared

• Martin Bröring

  Technische Universität Braunschweig

  26 shared

• Behnaz Ostovar

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  24 shared

• Liane S. Slaughter

  21 shared

Labs

• Link Research GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science…

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Catherine J. Murphyh-112
• Eric Oldfieldh-100
• Scott E. Denmarkh-99