The Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is requesting funds for the purchase of picosecond laser equipment and ancillary electronic and optical devices. These acquisitions will supplememt present research capabilities for a multiplicity of programs requiring picosecond time resolution, for example, transient absorption, dynamics of photo-driven events and characterization of nonlinear optical properties of materials. Included in the research proposed with this equipment are: 1) Light induced electron and energy transfer in transition metal complexes. 2) Directed electron and energy transfer in peptide assemblies. 3) Electron transfer rates in polymeric solvents: slow solvent dipoles. 4) Glasses of polymeric layered ultra-structure for optimum nonlinear optical responses. 5) Characterization of short-lived unsaturated organometallic complexes using transient absorption spectroscopy. 6) Multiphoton ionizationn via short lived Rydberg states and real time dynamics in weakly bound complexes. The system will be available to all members of the UNC scientific community. The instruments requested will all be conjoined with picosecond equipment assembled in the Department's Laser Laboratory, a multiuser facility operating since 1975. %%% Picosecond laser spectroscopy is a method for studying the very rapid ( 1/1,000,000,000,000 of a second) molecular processes that occur in chemical reactions and chemical dynamics. Such studies give one accurate information about the step-by-step details of how a chemical reaction proceeds and often give information about how a chemical process can be altered in order to give different products or make a given process more efficient.
