University of California - Irvine
CCI Phase II: The Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit (CaSTL)
The UC Irvine Center for Chemical Innovation - Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit (CaSTL) aims to observe and record chemistry in the act, one event at a time, one molecule at a time. By watching single molecules undergo chemical transformation and creating movies of a molecule's atomic and electronic rearrangements, the Center will uncover the inner workings of important chemical reactions. The vibronic dynamics of a molecule upon reduction, the rearrangement of electron density in a molecule as it adsorbs onto a catalytic site, the transfer of electrons through a molecular wire, and the breaking or making of a bond are among the immediate targets of investigation. The Center achieves its goals by pushing the experimental limits of space and time resolution, using a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy and ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopy to attain simultaneous Ångstrom-femtosecond resolution. On the scale of relevance to macro-molecular chemistry (e.g., nanometer-microsecond), scanning probe microscopies combined with time-resolved nonlinear spectroscopy are used to obtain chemically speciated, time-lapse microscopy. The requisite theory, in particular of plasmon-enhanced spectroscopy and time-dependent density functional methods, are developed in parallel to accurately model these processes, to interpret and to design experiments. The enabling science and tools have a common intellectual base and a toolset that can be tuned in sharpness to provide the precision needed to study a wide range of chemical processes with precise joint space-time resolution, from Ångstrom-femtosecond to micrometer-microsecond. The accessibility of time-lapse images of elementary chemical processes will fundamentally change our modes of inquiry, and manipulation of, molecular science and engineering, and could underlie fundamental breakthroughs in a range of fields relying on sub-molecular understanding and manipulation of our world.
CaSTL is committed to education at all levels, directly through graduate research and postdoctoral training in these challenging fields of science, and research opportunities to many California high school and community college students, particularly those from under-represented groups. The development of new scientific instruments and computational chemistry packages will be widely disseminated in partnership with the private sector. The Center will also offer an outreach program to students of all ages through a partnership with the Discovery Science Museum in Santa Ana. The very visual nature of the Center's transformative science makes it particularly accessible to the public at large. CaSTL video clips of fundamental chemical processes will be used in classrooms, podcasts and other web-based formats, and broad public science outreach will be enabled through television broadcasts.
