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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