Energy storage is an essential enabler for future sustainable technologies by linking renewable resources with the power grid. Following the great success of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in the commercial consumer electronics market, the increasing demand for improved energy density, lifetime, and safety in large-scale and power-intensive device applications calls for new materials with novel structures.

Helium nanodroplets provide a cold, inert, and optically transparent environment for doping atomic and molecular species. Helium's weak interaction with dopants is minimally perturbing, and facilitates the collection of high-resolution vibrational and rotational spectra. An instrument was designed that facilitates the ionization of dopant molecules using resonant two-photon ionization. Excitation of the molecular ions then occurs using a tunable OPO/OPA infrared laser.

Shock waves travelling through a material generate incredible amounts of pressure and cause irreversible changes in said material. Observing mechanical and chemical changes in an energetic material under shock is of particular interest in the study of detonations. Until recently, most experimental measurements of shock waves and shock induced chemistry have been limited to the nanosecond scale. Ultrafast Dynamic Ellipsometry (UDE) is a single-shot, picosecond scale probe of the transit of a shock through a condensed matter sample.

One of the major challenges facing intravenous nanoparticle administration is the formation of protein coronae on the surface of injected nanoparticles, which prevents them from reaching the target tissue. Biocompatible ionic liquids (ILs) have been shown to have tunable interactions with biomolecules including proteins and are prone to rearrangement on charged surfaces.

Cyclopropanone derivatives have long been regarded as unusable and elusive synthetic intermediates, mainly owing to their prominent ring strain and kinetic instability. In this work, we report the enantioselective synthesis of sulfonylcyclopropanols, shown to be modular and versatile synthetic equivalents of the corresponding cyclopropanone derivatives.