Materials that carry light without carrying the cost of the earth.

We encode information in the spectral fingerprints of carbonized-polymer microbeads. Each material carries a resonant signature set by its own synthesis history, so the code is physically unclonable: a counterfeit would have to reproduce the material, not just the pattern. The same encoding supports multi-level spectroscopic encryption from the visible into the infrared.

Before the photonic-materials work, the lab studied carbon materials for energy: nitrogen-doped carbons as catalyst supports and battery electrodes, bifunctional electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution and oxygen reduction, and 3D heterostructures for zinc-based storage. That work is the basis of the metal-free materials approach the lab uses today.

Transparent coatings and films built from carbon dots, nanocrystals and polymer composites. They screen ultraviolet and high-energy blue light, convert blue light to a safer emission, and block near-infrared heat while staying optically transparent. The design rule is that every element has to be abundant, benign and recyclable.

Rare-earth-doped crystals dominate solid-state lasing, and their supply chain is neither clean nor equitable. We replace that class of materials with fluorescent polymeric carbon dots and measure how their emission behaves under high pump densities and what limits them as a laser gain medium.

We build micro-resonators, mostly polymer, carbon-nitride and composite microspheres, whose geometry confines light into whispering-gallery modes. We control the size distribution and the refractive index of each bead to set the resonant wavelengths across the visible and near-infrared. The mode structure then shows up as sharp spectral signatures.