We are excited to see our latest paper on “Coherent Phonons in Antimony: An Undergraduate Physical Chemistry Solid-State Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy Experiment” published in the ACS Journal of Chemical Education. This paper in chemical education discusses in deep detail an ultrafast spectroscopy experiment that we developed for our undergraduate teaching laboratory at Berkeley. In the experiment, the students measure coherent phonons in antimony using the output of a femtosecond laser oscillator which they also characterize in the time domain. This lab experiment that is usually done by juniors and seniors in the Chemistry curriculum has since its inauguration become one of the favorite experiments that students in this course do. We hope it will spark excitement for research using ultrafast methods in their future careers.

This work was done in collaboration with Steve Leone and Anne Baranger.

Our open access paper is now published in the Journal of Chemical Education:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jchemed.2c00816