In September 2026 Youngwook Park will commence an assistant professorship at the Department of Chemistry, at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTEC), South Korea in the Surface Chemistry Lab. For his research he will develop a scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiment to study single-molecule manipulation and chemistry on surfaces, in particular, molecular motors, photo-chemistry and photo-induced synthesis on surfaces.

Symmetry principles constitute the foundation of physics, linking conservation laws to translational and rotational invariance. In crystalline solids, the transfer of energy and linear momentum between lattice vibrations via anharmonic coupling is a well-established concept governing thermal conductivity and equilibrium properties of materials. However, it has remained an open experimental challenge to directly observe how angular momentum is exchanged and conserved among lattice modes, even though angular [more...]