Departments of Physics and Chemistry
McGill University
CFI 2020 Innovation Fund Success! The Quantum Dynamics Lab is under development.
We are currently looking for motivated PhD students to join our group. Get in touch!
McGill Laboratory for Ultrafast Structural Dynamics
The group's activities are directed towards the development and application of new methods to directly observe the time-evolving structure of matter at the level of atomic-scale structural rearrangements in the unit cell.
The methods we are developing combine electron microscopes (designed and built in-house) with femtosecond pulsed lasers in novel ways. We have pushed time-resolution to below 100 fs, shorter than the typical period of a lattice vibration (phonon). By doing so, atomic motion is essentially frozen during an observation and we can follow all the fundamental dynamics to produce a "molecular movie"; the experimental equivalent of a molecular dynamics simulation. We hope to determine the structure and properties of material and molecular systems far from equilibrium with the precision we are accustomed to for systems near equilibrium.
Such studies will provide important details of the changes in configuration as systems evolve along some pathway between two stable equilibrium structures or phases. This kind of information is essential for understanding chemical reaction dynamics at a deep level (from small molecules to proteins), phase transition dynamics — both more standard phase transitions, and new exotic classes of so-called "photoinduced" phase transitions where photoexcitation provides a means to access novel phases of matter with electronic, structural, or magnetic order that are inaccessible by conventional routes.
