Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

NEED and URGENCY. In the past few years, my UBC research group has built a unique laser instrument an optical centrifuge, and used it to create and study new and exotic molecular objects, known as molecular super-rotors. Super-rotors are ultrafast rotating molecules whose synchronous uni-directional rotation is controlled by the laser field. Our centrifuge is one of three in the world (two until 2017) and the only one in Canada. It is also the only centrifuge worldwide in which the three fundamental parameters of molecular super-rotation its frequency, directionality and phase can be measured directly. This unique tool enabled us to perform a number of pioneering molecular studies, impossible in any other research laboratory. Yet several ongoing and newly proposed experiments are, or soon will be, stymied by the fact that no ultrafast laser source with variable wavelength is currently available to my group at UBC. Such source, known as an Optical Parametric Amplifier (OPA), is requested in this RTI application. Without the requested support, our existing edge over other groups around the world and the leadership of Canada (where the centrifuge was invented!) will quickly diminish.*RESEARCH PROGRAM. Until now, we have investigated the properties of isolated molecular super-rotors and their collisional properties within thermal molecular ensembles, where quantum correlations and many-body physics are of little importance. In the next few years, I will expand this research to studying rotational dynamics of molecules embedded in many-body quantum systems using the controlled laser spinning of molecules in superfluid helium and helium nanodroplets. More than 70 years ago, superfluidity was probed on a macroscopic scale by a mechanically controlled rotating top. Similar studies at the nanoscale proved impossible due to the lack of controllable microscopic rotors. An optical centrifuge combined with a source of ultrashort laser pulses of variable wavelength (the requested OPA) makes these studies feasible, and my group is ideally positioned to take the lead.*ADVANCEMENT of KNOWLEDGE and TRAINING. Controlled activation of molecular rotation inside quantum superfluids will provide us with an opportunity to study the dynamics of a rotating object interacting with complex quantum systems. Better understanding of such dynamics will have direct impact on the development of future quantum technologies, which are expected to revolutionize secure communications, computer analysis of biological systems, and sensing of small changes in electrical, magnetic and gravitational fields. OPAs are commonplace in state-of-the-art ultrafast optics laboratories, with numerous applications in spectroscopy, chemical physics, nonlinear optics, material science and beyond. Opportunities to learn this optical technology first-hand and utilize it in their own research will provide my students with a very marketable skill, which is hard to acquire anywhere else.*