Paola Luches

Paola Luches’s research interests are focused on oxide/metal materials at reduced dimensionality in view of their application in energy conversion and storage, catalysis, magnetism, plasmonics. In particular, she has a longstanding experience in the study of model systems, i.e. well controlled films and size-selected nanoparticles, aimed at the understanding of specific processes and of interfacial and surface interactions at the atomic scale. Her present research studies include reducible oxides, like CeO2 as thin films and nanoparticles, and their interaction with metals in the form of supported nanoparticles, dopant ions and substrates. The topics include the understanding and the optimization of reducibility, the interaction with plasmonic nanoparticles, the mechanisms of plasmonic energy transfer from metal nanoparticles to oxides, and the dynamics of photo-excited states. A further research topic concerns the reactivity of reducible oxides towards simple molecules, like H2, in view of the design of innovative electrodes for fuel cells and of efficient, stable and non-critical photocatalytic materials. The efficiency of reducible oxides as antioxidants within biomaterials is also one of her current research lines.

She has a longstanding experience with the use of physical synthesis techniques, like reactive MBE and magnetron sputtering with inert gas aggregation. Characterization tools include surface science methods, namely photoelectron spectroscopies and electron diffraction, scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy, combined with transmission electron microscopy and synchrotron radiation based techniques, like x-ray absorption spectroscopy, resonant inelastic x-ray scattering, nuclear resonant scattering of synchrotron radiation, and grazing incidence x-ray diffraction. More recently she developed an expertise on the use of ultrafast spectroscopies like femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy and pump-probe x-ray absorption spectroscopy.