News
Gordon Research Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena in Cooperative Systems at Pomona February 12, 2026
Henry Bell and Patrick Liu showcased their ultrafast electron microscopy and diffraction results at the Ultrafast GRC/GRS in Pomona, California. Patrick also received the Poster Award along with a $500 prize. Congratulations! The drive down I-5 turned into an interesting road trip, packed with great discussions alongside our theory friend, Antonio Picano.
DOE Early Career award January 20, 2026
Prof. Alfred Zong has been selected for the Early Career Research Program award by the U.S. Department of Energy. This award will fund the Zong Lab’s work on studying emergent magnetism in systems with strong spin-lattice coupling. The insights gained from these studies will expand the toolbox for manipulating magnetic order in quantum materials and inform broader strategies for ultrafast control of emergent phases that are governed by the lattice degree of freedom.
Ultrafast electron microscopy beamtime at Argonne December 21, 2025
Henry Bell and Dr. Chenhang Xu were busy examining the spatiotemporal evolution of bend contours near a micro-aperture using the ultrafast electron microscope at Argonne National Laboratory. Thanks to Dr. Thomas Gage for making the experiment possible around Christmas time!
Time-resolved X-ray beamtime with strained film at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne December 15, 2025
Dr. Chenhang Xu, Xin Wei, and Henry Bell conducted our first time-resolved X-ray scattering measurement on an in-situ strained film at beamline 7-ID-C at APS, in collaboration with Drs. Haidan Wen, Philip Ryan, and Boyang Zhao at Argonne National Laboratory.
2025 SSRL/LCLS Users' Meeting September 24, 2025
Henry Bell and Patrick Liu presented their posters at the 2025 SSRL/LCLS Users' Meeting held at SLAC National Lab. Henry's poster focuses on strain and topography reconstruction of freestanding films using TEM. Patrick's poster is on measuring spin-lattice coupling in the absence of long-range magnetic ordering, which won this year's Joe Wong Outstanding Poster Award. Congratulations!
Welcome September 16, 2025
Welcome Kiran Mak and Yiting Huang to the Zong lab!
New ultrafast electron diffraction study on Ta2NiSe5, a (failed?) excitonic insulator candidate August 26, 2025
Congratulations to Dr. Chenhang Xu and team on a new paper titled “Structural contribution to light-induced gap suppression in Ta2NiSe5”, which was published in Physical Review Letters. Here we employ MeV ultrafast electron diffraction to obtain quantitative insights into the atomic displacements in this excitonic candidate, and we find that the structural change can largely account for the photoinduced reduction in the energy gap without considering excitonic effects.
Strained freestanding film at the SLAC MeV-UED beamline June 23, 2025
Dr. Chenhang Xu and Patrick Liu attempted our first UED measurement on an in-situ strained film, in collaboration with Alex Reid and the MeV-UED team at SLAC. With uncanny precision, Chenhang aligned the crystallographic axes perfectly with the UED camera: not once, but three times!
New lab spaces in the Varian basement June 6, 2025
Our new lab spaces in the basement of the Varian Physics Building are close to completion. The great migration begins soon!
Ultrafast electron diffraction beamtime at SLAC March 2, 2025
In collaboration with the Zuerch Group at UC Berkeley, Patrick Liu, Dr. Chenhang Xu, and Henry Bell undertook a week-long MeV-UED beamtime at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, investigating the putative coupling between superlattice chirality and circular polarization of light. A great sign that everyone is still smiling at 3 AM despite the adrenaline rush from a software crash and an electron beam dump in the final hours of beamtime!
Quantum Science Seed Grant February 14, 2025
We are excited to share that we have been awarded the Stanford Quantum Science Seed Grant in collaboration with Profs. Charlotte Bøttcher and Trithep Devakul to study multi-scale coherent magnons in magnetic moiré heterostructures.
Review paper on “Time-domain study of coupled collective excitations in quantum materials” February 14, 2025
Congratulations to Dr. Chenhang Xu on a new review paper titled “Time-domain study of coupled collective excitations in quantum materials”, which was published in npj Quantum Materials.
Welcome January 6, 2025
Welcome Ruixin Qiu, Megan Loh, and Jacob Ruiz to the Zong lab!
The Community of Shared Research Platforms (c-ShARP) Voucher Program November 19, 2024
We have been selected as one of the 19 winning proposals in the Stanford c-ShaRP Voucher Program this year, and we are going to partner with the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities to study nonequilibrium phase competition in oxide perovskite ultrathin films.
XII Ultrafast Dynamics & Metastability and Ultrafast Bandgap Photonics September 25, 2024
Dr. Chenhang Xu gave an invited talk titled “Quantifying transient structure and phonon evolution in photoinduced transitions by MeV ultrafast electron diffraction” at the 12th Ultrafast Dynamics & Metastability and Ultrafast Bandgap Photonics Conference in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Welcome September 16, 2024
Welcome to Dr. Chenhang Xu, Henry Bell, Yu-Che Chien, and Patrick Liu, the first group of postdoc and students of the Zong lab!
Time Zero September 1, 2024
We are about to increase the entropy of this optical table among many others. Hello, World!