AmericanChemicalSociety.com

"Ten years ago AH Zewail(Caltech) won the Nobel prize for using femtosecond spectroscopy to study atomic motion during chemical reactions.Emerging from Zewail,s pioneering work is the ability to use intense femtosecond laser pulses to create attosecond pulses and then monitor attosecond-scale electron dynamics which was the focus of a Division of Physical Chemistry national meeting in Salt Lake city last month"-this is the first paragraph of the ACS meeting News, Chemical & Engineering News april 13,2009,vol

87,pp50-51 edition.

The Attosecond Science symposium coorganized by A D Bandrauk (PhD,FRSC,FAAAS,U of Sherbrooke,Canada) and SR Leone(Chemistry

Professor,UC Berkeley) was the first ever symposium at an ACS meeting

featuring recent advances in laser technology and their applications to chemical electron dynamics problems.The main themes were highlighted in the CNN article mentioned above:

Tracking electrons:"Attosecond science opens the door to real time observation of control of electron dynamics"(Jyllian Kemsley).

Notable speakers considered pioneers in this new area of chemical dynamics were:

PB Corkum(NRC,Ottawa,CAD),S Mukamel(UC Irvine,USA),K Ohmori(IMS,JPN),O Gessner(LBNL,USA),L Cederbaum(Heidelberg U,DE),D Beratan(Duke Univ,USA),R Santra(Argonne NL,USA),SI Chu(Kansas Univ,USA),M Murnane(JILA,Co,USA),D M Neumark(UC Berkeley,USA),R J Levis(Temple Univ,USA),T Uzer(GaTech,USA),K Yamanouchi(U Tokyo,JPN),H Kono(Sendai,JPN),J Manz(FU Berlin,DE),AM Maquet(U Paris VI,FR),K Takatsuka(U Tokyo,JPN),R deVivie-Riedl(U Munich,DE),M Vrakking(FOM,NdL),JC Kieffer(INRS,CAD),K Midorikawa(RIKEN,JPN),T Nguyen-Dang(U Laval,CAD),F Ramacle(U Liege,BEL),RD Levine (Hebrew Univ,Isr).

To these main lectures were added about ten contributed oral communications from young scientists currently active in Attosecond science.

The symposium was "exceedingly" well attended especially by curious participants who were intrigued by the futuristic title.Furthermore the joint financial support of ACS,s PRF and advanced laser companies

: FemtoLasers,Amplitude,Coherent,KM Lasers contributed to lively coffee sessions were experimentalists,theorists and laser technicians exchanged ideas about future directions of this new science.

Finally many of the oral presentations were published in a special issue of "Chemical Physics,vol 366(2009)" coedited by participants AD Bandrauk(Sherbrooke,CAD),J Manz(FU Berlin,DE) and M Vrakking(FOM,NdL) on "Attosecond Molecular Dynamics".

These coeditors wish to express their gratitude to ACS,PRF,s SE program for having made this symposium possible with its futuristic vision,the control of electrons in molecules. Chemical research has spent two centuries on molecular structure.Current new laser technology is allowing us to complete the ultimate goal of this ongoing research, the visualisation and control of electron dynamics in molecules.