Molecules & Picoseconds: Redefining Microscopic to Engineer the Future at Every Scale

From therapeutics saving lives to dyes brining us color, molecules make up everything around us. Inventing new reactions enables us to create new molecules or to interact with existing ones to bring new functions to light.

Every time you plug in your phone, billions of tiny atoms are moving through a solid material in about a trillionth of a second. That's a picosecond, the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair. Here's the strange part: the solid vibrates constantly, and those vibrations can nudge ions to hop from one spot to the next. The mystery? Fewer than 1 in 10 vibrations work. The rest just shake the crystal, generate heat, and get in the way. So, how do we use this to our advantage in designing better batteries? In this talk, I'll show you what we found when we used ultrafast lasers to catch ions mid-hop for the first time, why understanding a trillionth of a second turns out to be the key to building batteries that charge in seconds, last longer, and don't catch fire.