Events in physical chemistry.

Will It Move? Investigating Uranium(VI) Sorption and Mobility in Future Nuclear Waste Repositories

Abstract: The long-term storage of nuclear waste poses a series of scientific and technical challenges. One question to resolve is how we can best minimize and predict the release of radioactive contaminants into the environment after waste canisters have degraded.  Environmental risk assessments for nuclear waste repositories will have to cover wide field scales and a timespan over at least 100,000 years.

What 2DIR Can Tell Us About Complex and Heterogeneous Biophysical Systems

Abstract:

While two-dimensional infrared (2DIR) spectroscopy has been useful for studying properties of peptides and proteins, many of those results were made on “clean”, homogenous samples. My lab’s long-term goal is to turn the sensitive and ultrafast observables of 2DIR into useful image contrast agents for complex biophysical systems, where they can answer questions related to solvation dynamics and molecular structure that few other imaging methods can address. To that end, I will present three projects from my lab that move us closer to this goal.

Near-field optical spectroscopy for the study of semiconducting nanostructures

Semiconducting nanostructures have been proposed as material platforms for a wide variety of photonic, electronic, and photovoltaic elements. In order to realize these applications, careful design and characterization of electronic properties such as dopant concentration, activation, and distribution are needed. I will discuss the use of near-field optical microscopy as a non-destructive method for chemical, structural, and electronic imaging in nanomaterials, focusing on a specific application, the study of axially-doped silicon nanowires (SiNWs).

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