On Friday 9th December, I gave a public presentation at the Arnolfini (Bristol) about the danceroom spectroscopy project – describing what it’s about, what we’ve done, and where it might go. Click here to look at my my slides, here for links to the video clips I showed, and here for a radio interview I gave (starts at 42 mins, ~4/5 the way through).

Chemistry is about breaking and making chemical bonds. On a microscopic level, breaking a chemical bond requires that a large quantity of energy is first localized in that particular bond. Similarly, making a chemical bond places lots of energy into a particular bond. Most chemical reactions take place with reactant molecules embedded in a sea of unreactive liquid (or solvent) molecules.  Common solvents, including water and organic liquids, play an important role in both shuffling energy to reacting molecules, and subsequently shuffling it away after reaction has occurred.  However, when chemists think about reactions in liquids, they tend to overlook the underlying energy shuffle that transports energy to and from the chemical reaction.  Instead, they focus on the equilibrium states that occur well before, and well after, a reaction occurs, which are well described by a theoretical paradigm based on linear response theory and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem.
Continue reading →

From 11th-16th September, I attended the 2011 Conference On Molecular Energy Transfer (COMET), and gave an oral presentation. The meeting programme featured a number of memorable talks from well-known scientists like Gerard Meijer, Arthur Suits, Alec Wodtke, John Tully, Dick Zare, Kopin Liu, Rienk van Grondelle, Fleming Crim, Dan Neumark, Paul Corkum, Jun Ye, and Ed Hinds. The presentations spanned a range disciplines across chemical physics including cold molecule chemistry, surface dynamics, ultrafast biochemistry, condensed phase chemistry, and interfacial dynamics.

On 8th September, I gave a talk about our science-meets-art project, danceroom spectroscopy, at a TEDx event in Bristol (where x = independently organized) that was held at the MShed. Mine was the concluding talk of the day. Feedback was excellent. Further details, including videos and photos, can be found here.

On 27th and 28th August, we did Spectroscopy at the Shambala Festival.  We projected onto a massive 11 m diameter screen suspended between two large trees. Our mission control was up in a treehouse! You can download a *.zip file of photos here.

Footage from our recent exhibition at the Arnolfini (Bristol). There’s also some photos that you can see here, and a very interesting article about one man’s dS experience.

On 6 august, I gave a short description of danceroom spectroscopy for BBC radio Bristol on the Saturday breakfast show. You can listen to it here – my interview is the last one before the show ends – at 2:57:00 elapsed time… unfortunately, the recording cuts out at 3:00:00! (it didnt cut out live)

Over the past few weeks, I was in the US. From July 15-17, I participated in the CHARMM meeting, which is organized by Martin Karplus. I gave a talk about recent contributions that I have made to the CHARMM biophysics simulation package. I also visited colleagues in the chemical dynamics section at Argonne National Labs and in Fleming Crim’s group at UW-Madison. During both of these visits, I gave talks about solution phase chemical dynamics.

Check out some unedited clips from our recent danceroom spectroscopy workshops.