University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
Moran Group
Welcome to the Moran Research Group
Current Projects
Organic Crystals
Photosynthetic Proteins
Light driven electron and energy transfer
processes abound in nature and technology.
Our research specializes to systems in which
these dynamics occur on the femtosecond time
scale. The general goal of our experimental
work is to understand how interactions between
electrons and nuclei control the outcome of
photoinduced events. Of particular interest is
the impact of many-body correlations (i.e.,
correlated exciton fluctuations) imposed by
collective motion of the chromophore
environment. Our experimental work is
complemented by theory and numerical
simulations.

Nonlinear laser spectroscopies are the common
tool used in our research projects. These
experiments effectively synchronize
photoinduced events in a large population of
individual molecules then track relaxation with
femtosecond time resolution. We are particularly
interested in developing novel multi-
dimensional spectroscopies that correlate
electronic motion to nuclear structure in systems
composed of interacting chromophores. The
development of equipment used to generate
laser pulses with widely tunable frequencies
and bandwidths is important for meeting our
research objectives.
Research Summary
Molecular Aggregates
Website designed by Haoming Liu
Femtosecond dynamics of molecular excitons in light harvesting proteins,
nanostructured molecular aggregates, and organic molecular crystals. [25,26]
Development of specialized optical
parametric amplifiers producing laser
pulses with bandwidths tunable between
25 cm and 1500 cm at visible wavelengths
.
[26]
An experiment has been developed to
probe intraband exciton coherence.
This pulse sequence is particularly
sensitive to exciton correlations and
transformations of photoexcited
electronic coherence.[26]
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