This award will provide renewed support for the Science and Technology Center for Photoinduced Charge Transfer. All of the Center research projects will be jointly directed by University of Rochester faculty members and researchers from the Eastman Kodak Company and/or Xerox Corporation. The research will be concerned primarily with providing answers to three fundamental questions: What are the structural, environmental and energetic factors that control the fundamental rates and efficiencies of electron transfer, charge separation and charge transport? How can these factors be manipulated to obtain new chemistry and useful reaction products? How can new materials and devices be developed for photochemically based technology? The various Center research projects will investigate photoinduced charge transfer in a wide variety of chemical systems, including gas-phase clusters, homogeneous solutions, organized assemblies such as Langmuir-Blodgett films, solids, and across interfaces. Each project will make use of a wide variety of skills, usually drawn from more than one branch of science. Synthetic organic chemistry will be used to build new molecules with particular photochemical properties, and complex systems will be assembled using a variety of methods, including surface science, polymer science and molecular biology. All the systems under study will be characterized using modern spectroscopy and other tools of physical chemistry, including state-of-the-art, ultrafast laser techniques. Theoretical studies will be an important component of the research, with theory being used in several projects to both guide and interpret experiments. %%% Photoinduced charge transfer is of intense current interest to researchers in several disciplines and is the basis of imaging science and technology. The participation of Kodak and Xerox researchers in the Center provides an effective conduit for technology transfer, and some of the basic research findings of Center projects have already been put into practical use at Kodak and Xerox. The Center provides an excellent environment for multidisciplinary training of graduate students and undergraduates, and the Center has also been the site of a summer research program for high school teachers. Center researchers have also designed and built a low-cost scanning tunnelling microscope which will be manufactured for use in college and high school laboratories and in the training of industrial researchers in the use of this type of instrument.
