More about the Programme
The ultrafast time scale of femtoseconds to picoseconds is the time scale of elementary chemical reactions and of electronic and nuclear motions in molecules. Some may think that practical chemistry and biology occurs on much longer time scales, but these longer time scales are often reached by adding statistical probability to the short time scale dynamics of molecules. For instance, when a molecule attempts to escape over the potential barrier, the slow time scale may result because there are about 109 attempts before the molecule actually succeeds. Thus, our fundamental understanding of chemical and biological dynamics ultimately relies upon a thorough explanation of the ultrafast processes. Ultrafast spectroscopy has been applied to most areas of chemistry and molecular mechanisms of the function of many biological systems have been established. With the emerging new and highly reliable techniques for ultrashort pulse generation, completely new applications of ultrashort pulses come within reach. Time resolved (fs) single molecule spectroscopy, scanning two-photon fluorescence microscopy, fs X-ray pulse generation, very low damage material processing and surgery, automatic feed-back coherent control of reactions, etc. All these new extensions of ultrashort pulse applications will be important topics of this Programme.
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