Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

The acquisition of a femtosecond transient absorption spectrometer which is necessary to study and understand the dynamics of photoexcitation events on extremely short timescales, form femtosecond to nanosecond, is proposed. The instrument will provide the tools needed to investigate ultrafast phenomena in molecules and materials, and is required for ongoing research in fields as diverse as photophysics, photochemistry, photobiology, and photomedicine. The proposed equipment will be located at the Laboratory for Advanced Spectroscopy and Imaging Research (LASIR) in the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia (UBC). LASIR is founded with CFI-funded infrastructure in 2006 and is now a shared user facility located at UBC and Simon Fraser University (SFU). LASIR provides services and access to many researchers within and outside the university, and has been a major factor in international collaborations. The facility is utilized by more than 60 principal investigators, and more than 150 undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and research associates. The femtosecond transient absorption spectrometer is urgently needed as many of the most important energy transfer processes and photochemical reactions occur on this time-scale and cannot currently be investigated due to the lack of this infrastructure.