Having it all: Discerning charge and heat in energy transduction and nanoscale transport

Very few materials are able to absorb visible light without dissipating some of the resulting energy into phonon modes, and these excited modes have the capability to act back on the electronic excitation that is generated. By the same token, very few probes of photophysical processes in materials are able to directly probe the coexistence of both electronic and thermal departures from equilibrium or directly visualize the impact of the spatiotemporal interaction of electronic and thermal excitations. I will nevertheless, describe such a capability that leverages not only the ps time resolution associated with electronic to thermal energy transduction but also direct spatial maps of localized photoinduced electronic and temperature profiles and their coupled evolution. This approach shows thermoelectric effects in few-layer MoS₂ and can be more broadly applied to other emerging semiconductors.