Time-resolved imaging of photo-induced dynamics Faraday Discussion

The Royal Society of Chemistry are pleased to announce that this event is moving online. If you have any questions please contact us at events@rsc.org

Welcome

On behalf of the scientific committee, we extend a warm invitation to you to join us online in February 2021 for a Faraday Discussion on the theme of Time-resolved imaging of photo-induced dynamics. We are of course disappointed not to be able to welcome you all in Mumbai, but we feel that the virtual format of this meeting is the safest option and provides all delegates with some certainty around the meeting. This will be the sixth Faraday Discussion meeting using the virtual format and we anticipate that this will provide a stimulating meeting in our exciting and rapidly developing area of research
 
Faraday Discussions are unique international scientific conferences that focus on rapidly developing areas of chemistry and their interfaces with other scientific disciplines. Many Discussions have become landmarks in their field, and we hope you will join us at this Discussion to make your contribution to this famous series of meetings.
 
The meeting will be of interest to established scientists as well as post-graduate students and industrial researchers interested in photo-induced processes.

We very much hope you will join us for this virtual discussion and we look forward to welcoming you.
 
Gopal Dixit and Adam Kirrander 
Co-Chairs, Time-Resolved Imaging of Photo-Induced Dynamics

Aims

The purpose of this meeting is to gather key participants representing the full scientific scope of the topic. Bringing together different communities of experimentalist and theoreticians working on similar topics but from different perspectives provides an opportunity to ask the fundamental questions and to set the agenda for future research.

Format

Faraday Discussions have a special format where research papers written by the speakers are distributed to all participants before the meeting, and most of the meeting is devoted to discussing the papers. Everyone contributes to the discussion - including presenting their own relevant research. The research papers and a record of the discussion are published in the journal Faraday Discussions.

Find out more about the Faraday Discussions in this video
 

Themes

Photo-induced processes are of tremendous importance in the natural world and across science. Examples include ultrafast process in vision, energy-release by water-splitting in photosynthesis, chemical reactions in the atmosphere, photocatalysis, and technologies such as petahertz electronics, photovoltaics, and light-emitting diodes. Due to the intrinsic complexity of photo-induced processes, they remain the least understood type of physical and chemical processes. Strong and weak laser induced electron and nuclear dynamics on ultrafast time-scales, nonadiabatic dynamics, quantum effects and conical intersections are known to be important, but the full picture is still being unveiled and a cohesive understanding assembled. New experimental techniques, capable of monitoring photo-induced processes with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution across the entire reaction path, play a key role in this. These developments are driven by the appearance of free-electron lasers, such as the XFEL in Europe, the LCLS (and soon LCLS-II) in the USA, SACLA in Japan, PAL in Korea and Swiss-FEL in Switzerland, new sources of pulsed electrons, table-top based attosecond laser sources, and advanced detection techniques. A large and important contribution is made by advances in theory and computational modelling, in particular in terms of (nonadiabatic) quantum dynamics simulations and theoretical models that improve the interpretation and analysis of experiments.

The Faraday Discussion will be organised into the following four themes:

• Time-resolved Diffraction

The session focuses on emerging time-resolved diffraction methods made possible by new x-ray lasers and ultrafast electron sources. Ultrafast diffraction by x-rays or electrons is rapidly becoming a powerful complement to spectroscopic techniques for the imaging of ultrafast dynamics of atoms and electrons in matter

• Time-Resolved Ultrafast Spectroscopy

This session will focus on the time-resolved photo-induced spectroscopy that can be performed using new table-top ultrashort XUV and VUV light sources within pump-probe setup, as well as new technologies such as attosecond streaking and RABBITT to explore attosecond electron dynamics. Often these studies form important ingredients as these measurements only perturb the processes weakly

• Strong-Field Physics

This session will focus on the experimental and theoretical aspects of strong-field physics, which form the basis of high harmonic spectroscopy, above-threshold ionization etc., which are most promising of a new generation methods to explore photo-induced dynamics in matter. It will focus on the challenges associated with unravelling the experimental observations and how these experiments can be extended to larger systems.

• Ultrafast X-ray Science

This session will focus on the new scientific opportunities made possible by the operation of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) in Stanford, Hamburg, Japan, Korea and other places. The session will cover both high energy and high intensity experiments relevant to ultrafast physical, chemical and biological processes, including the theoretical modelling of how these intense pulses interact with matter.

Attendance

The Royal Society of Chemistry is keen to encourage and enable as many people as possible to attend our events, to benefit from the networking opportunities and the chance to hear talks from leaders in the field. If you would like to discuss accessibility, or have childcare, caring responsibilities or other care needs, please contact us to discuss your requirements so that we can enable your attendance. Please refer also to our Grants for carers fund, for more information please see the ‘bursaries’ section on this page.