Chemical bonds are formed or broken incredibly quickly – on the femtosecond (one million billionth of a second) time scale. Femtochemistry, the study of chemical reactions in real time, provides detailed insights into chemical reactivity. The femtochemistry group at UEA was recently awarded more than £1m to pursue new research directions in this area.

Ultrafast laser technology has advanced to the extent that experiments of a complexity which was unimaginable only a few years ago now fall within the realms of the possible, and have the potential to become routine. Modern solid state laser sources produce ultrastable pulses a few million billionths of a second wide with extreme stability over most of the electromagnetic spectrum. This opens up almost any atomic or molecular process to real time interrogation. In this project we will develop three experiments at the cutting edge of advanced laser spectroscopy. Our objective is to apply these experiments to important problems in molecular and biomolecular science, with a view to demonstrating their utility, and with the objective of establishing them as important new tools for materials characterisation. In particular we are interested in molecules and molecular assembles which play a role in the conversion of solar energy to mechanical or electrical energy. To this end we have established collaborations with world leading laboratories in molecular and biomolecular materials science both here at UEA, in the UK, Europe and the USA. The advanced materials developed by our collaborators will be the first target for these new methods. The research is led by Prof. Steve Meech.See this link for a related article at Photonics.com.