Victoria was interviewed by BBC Radio Bristol for the Laura Rawlings show as part of their ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ segment curated by the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials. Victoria gave a splendid overview of her PhD research project that involves investigating the molecular mechanisms of photosynthesis. The interview can be found on BBC iPlayer here and starts at 26:20.

Ashley Beckstead from Montana State University and the laboratory of Professor Bern Kohler, is visiting our group for two weeks to investigate the non-adiabatic relaxation dynamics of violacein molecules in various solutions.

Applications are invited for an EPSRC funded research associate role with Dr Tom Oliver in the Laser Chemistry, Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol. This project involves a close collaboration with Dr Mike Jones in the School of Biochemistry. The appointee will use state-of-the-art multidimensional optical spectroscopies to explore inter-pigment electronic energy transfer dynamics in bacterial reaction centres.

Applicants should have, or be about to graduate with a Ph.D. in Chemistry, Chemical Physics, or a related discipline. Candidates should have proven experience with at least some of the following: laser spectroscopy, ultrafast laser technology and non-linear optics.

This 1 year position is available from 1st January 2017.

The research associate will also be expected to assist in supervising PhD students in the research group of Dr. Tom Oliver. Informal enquiries may be addressed to: tom.oliver@bristol.ac.uk.

The full job description can be found here and applications made here.

We heard from the Royal Society today that a small Research Grant (£15K) was successfully funded. This grant will enable us to construct a fully background free 2DES spectrometer.

EPSRC informed us that our research grant “Exploring Delocalised Energy Transport in Bacterial Reaction Centres” was successfully funded. The grant provides financial support for a postdoctoral researcher and a consumables budget to construct a 2D electronic-vibrational spectroscopy apparatus. The project includes a close collaboration with Dr Mike Jones in Biochemistry.

This week we welcome Victoria and Marta as incoming PhD students to the Oliver research group. They will be exploring the weird and fascinating dynamics of photosynthetic light harvesting and photovoltaic materials using novel multidimensional optical spectroscopies and ultrafast microscopy.

Henkjan Gersen (Physics, Bristol), Marta Duchi (starting in September in our group) and I trekked back and forth to Norwich this week to collect an Ultrafast Tunable Oscillator (Chameleon, Coherent), OPO (Coherent), Nikon Inverted Microscope and other toys! In total we travelled 500 miles in two days but everything made it to Bristol in one piece.

My application for an ultrafast laser system has been successful. In the next two months we will receive a Coherent Libra regenerative amplifier laser system (1W, 100 fs) and OPerA Solo optical parametric amplifier. The laser is being retired due to the closure of the laser loan pool administered by the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Unravelling Energy and Charge Transport Mechanisms in Natural Light Harvesting and Photovoltaic Materials

A fully funded PhD position is available in the Oliver group with a standard EPSRC stipend of £14,296 for 2016/2017.

Photosynthetic organisms harness energy from sunlight to power most biological activity on Earth. Inside chloroplasts of plants, sunlight is absorbed by billions of chlorophyll molecules and used to drive photosynthesis; carbon dioxide and water are converted into simple sugars essential for plant growth. This remarkable natural process regularly achieves 100% efficiency: every photon absorbed is converted into chemical energy. Our efforts to harness solar energy with man-made photovoltaic (PV) technology to generate electricity have, to date, been far less effective. To meet the ever-growing global energy demands, it is imperative for our society to develop renewable and more efficient PV devices that can take full advantage of the abundant solar flux.

This project will use cutting-edge ultrafast laser spectroscopies such as two-dimensional electronic-vibrational spectroscopy [1] and 2D electronic spectroscopy [2], to follow create a map of energy/charge flow between molecules with femtosecond time resolution (1 fs = one millionth billionth of a second) in natural light harvesting proteins, biomimetic counterparts and leading PV materials such as perovskites, quantum dots and organic bulk heterojunction polymers.

By understanding the routes and timescales of energy flow inside natural light harvesting systems and PV materials, we will seek to gain a fundamental understanding on the molecular level of the mechanisms that underpin energy transport and charge-separation. These insights will provide (1) a greater fundamental understanding of natural light harvesting and (2) a guide to the design of the next-generation thin film PV materials.

This project involves strong collaborations with Dr Mike Jones, Dr Ross Anderson (School of Biochemistry), and Professor David Fermin (School of Chemistry) at the University of Bristol.

[1] TAA Oliver, NHC Lewis and GR Fleming, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 111, 10061 (2014).
[2] VM Huxter, TAA Oliver, D Budker and GR Fleming, Nat. Physics., 9, 744 (2013).

For more project details and informal enquiries contact Dr Tom Oliver: tom.oliverATbristol.ac.uk

My project to study the ultrafast relaxation pathways of anthocyanins has been granted laser time at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Our study will seek to determine whether non-radiative decay of anthocyanin molecules are driven by excited state or ground state proton transfer.