Chemical Analysis of Nanodomains

Personnel

Project Leader(s):
Emily Smith

Principal Investigators:
Ning Fang, Jacob Petrich, Emily Smith

Overview

We seek to understand the basic principles that underlie energy-relevant chemical separations; develop analytical methods to improve the sensitivity, reliability, and productivity of analytical determinations; and to develop new approaches to analysis. Our research emphasizes instrumentation and technique development highly relevant to the main focus areas of the Separation and Analysis activities of the Division of Chemical Science, Geoscience and Biosciences within the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.  

The goal of this research is to develop the next generation of imaging tools and methodologies for the analysis of phenomena that occur at nanometer length scales and picosecond time scales. The developed instrumentation and methodology will be applied to model systems of interest to the DOE mission, where fundamental insight can be gained with the high spatial and temporal resolution afforded by our developed methods: chemical reac tions in heterogeneous silica supported catalysts; the organization and dynamics of mixed model lipid bilayers and cell membranes; chromatographic interactions; and heterogeneous enzyme reactions. The methods we propose to develop are:

1. High resolution total internal reflection (TIR) Raman microspectroscopy and imaging
2. Sub-diffraction limited imaging, including differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy, variable-angle evanescent-field (EFM) microscopy, and time-resolved stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy
3. Novel single molecule spectroscopies

This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences through the Ames Laboratory.  The Ames Laboratory is operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Iowa State University under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11358.

Publications