Stefan Bernhard
Stefan Bernhard is a Swiss scientist who has worked in fields related to the interaction between light and transition metal complexes. His involvement in the prediction, generation, and spectroscopy of circularly polarized luminescence from synthesized chiral phosphors have significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in this relatively young sub-field of photophysical chemistry. Other contributions involve work in artificial photosynthesis and organic light-emitting diodes.
Contributions
Circularly Polarized Luminescence SpectroscopyCapable of measuring dissymmetry factors of even weakly luminescent materials to within a reported error as small as 10−6, the home-built CPL spectrometer created and used by the Bernhard lab is more sensitive than any previously demonstrated CPL spectrometer. In addition, it was shown that CPL dissymmetry factors can be predicted computationally over a diverse sampling of known luminophore architectures, validating a new and facile tool for directing synthetic efforts in the search for anisotropic emitters.
Artificial photosynthesis
Efforts in this field have focused on solution-based water photolysis. Breaking the problem into smaller components, the Bernhard lab has distinguished its efforts in photosensitization, water photoreduction catalysis, and water oxidation catalysis. These contributions consist primarily of advancement beyond prior art in catalyst longevity and electronic control.
Organic light emitting devices
The primary outcome of work in this field has been ionic transition metal complex devices with improved turn-on times, achieved by A), or B) .