Felix R. Fischer

The Fischer group uniquely combines organic synthesis with advanced atomically resolved scanning probe imaging techniques. This highly interdisciplinary research program is represented by an equally diverse team of researchers building on expertise in molecular organic synthesis, condensed matter physics, and electrical engineering. Our scientific interests span across a broad spectrum ranging from rational bottom-up design and molecular synthesis of carbon nanomaterials with atomically defined structures, their controlled assembly into hierarchically ordered 1D and 2D architectures, to the exploration of their most exotic physical properties emerging from quantum confinement effects across multiple length, time, and energy scales using bond resolved imaging and spectroscopic techniques. Researchers in the Fischer group strive to understand, fine-tune, and ultimately harness the exceptional properties of nanoscale materials by developing a suite of novel synthetic tools that offer an unprecedented control over geometric parameters that collectively give rise designer quantum materials whose intrinsic electronic structure can be tuned with atomic precision. It is this unique strength and expertise—a combination of rational molecular design and bottom-up organic synthesis—that has given rise to some never before realized materials properties that extend far beyond the exciting physics of parent materials like 2D graphene. Highly tunable semiconductors, intrinsically metallic band structures, long range magnetic ordering in spin chains, and even the emergence of symmetry protected topological states have all be realized by rational design of real space structural parameters including among others width, symmetry, edge termination, and substitutional doping.