Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Many reactions occur too fast to be seen by the naked eye.  Chemical reactions can occur in times that are a billion times faster than the blinking of the human eye.  Understanding how these reactions happen provides essential information to be able to manipulate them to our advantage.  Laser flash photolysis (LFP) is a technique employed to study these fast reactions.  The reaction is started with a laser, which is a very intense light source of one color that delivers the light in a short pulse (10 ns, ten one billionth of a second).  Measuring the color change due to reactant disappearance or product formation follows the chemical reactions that occur after the laser pulse.  This proposal is requesting funds for the replacement for the YAG laser used in the LFP facility at the University of Victoria.  This laser is 14 years old and recently failed twice with a down time of 4 weeks on the first occasion and 2 weeks on the second occasion. It is currently only working marginally. The laser is not maintained by its manufacturer because it is obsolete and for this reason it has reached the end of its lifetime. Continued access to LFP experiments is essential for the work done in the Bohne (supramolecular dynamics) and Wan (mechanistic organic photochemistry) groups, since all of their work relies on LFP experiments.  Access is also critical for the Frank (photomagnetism) and Mitchell (photochromic materials) groups, since LFP experiments are essential to provide mechanistic insights into the photochromic properties of the materials studied in these groups.