Conference: Addressing Challenges in Ultrafast Photochemistry and Photocatalysis: Opportunities for Theory and Experiment

With support from the Chemical Structure and Dynamics (CSD) and Chemical Theory, Models, and Computational Methods (CTMC) programs in the Division of Chemistry, Professors Lawrence Baker of Ohio State University, Xiaosong Li of University of Washington, Sharon Hammes-Schiffer of Princeton University, and Krupa Ramasesha of Sandia National Laboratory will organize a three-day workshop focused on ultrafast photochemistry and photocatalysis. The workshop will convene leading researchers across theory and experiment to address critical scientific challenges and explore opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration in ultrafast photochemistry and photocatalysis. Recent advances in experimental techniques as well as new theoretical methods make this a fruitful area for collaborations with potential to advance fundamental understanding of key chemical transformations, resulting in more efficient and selective chemical processing, energy conversion, and storage. This workshop will provide a timely forum for discussing cutting-edge developments in experimental and theoretical approaches to ultrafast photochemistry and photocatalysis, with the goal to foster new collaborations and promote scientific and educational innovation across disciplines. Ultrafast pulses have become increasingly powerful tools for probing electronic and nuclear structural dynamics in chemical systems, from isolated molecules to nanoscale materials and interfaces to complex biological assemblies. Recent advances in both the development of and access to ultrafast light sources, especially at short wavelengths, have significantly enhanced the community’s ability to directly observe ultrafast electron and nuclear motion through a combination of spectroscopy, diffraction, and imaging experiments. These techniques now offer new insights into the time-resolved dynamics that govern photochemical and photocatalytic processes. While these experimental breakthroughs open new windows into fundamental chemical processes, they also present major theoretical and computational challenges. This workshop will address the need to integrate advances in ultrafast experimental techniques with state-of-the-art theoretical modeling by laying the groundwork for innovative collaborations between experiment and theory. The resulting workshop report will serve as a roadmap to the community for tackling open questions in excited-state electronic structure, core-level spectroscopies, and time-resolved photochemistry. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.