Primary Supervisor - Dr Kayn Forbes
Ultrafast spectroscopy allows us to follow some of the fastest processes in nature, capturing the motion of energy, electrons and molecular excitations on femtosecond timescales. In this sense, it offers a route towards making “molecular movies”: watching how a system responds immediately after absorbing light and following its evolution in real time. Understanding these processes is important across areas such as solar-energy conversion, photocatalysis, optoelectronics and emerging quantum materials, where performance is often controlled by ultrafast energy flow and relaxation.
At the same time, modern photonics allows light itself to be sculpted in increasingly sophisticated ways. Beyond colour and polarisation, we can control its spatial phase, intensity, angular momentum and three-dimensional structure. This PhD will bring these two areas together by developing time-resolved spectroscopy with structured light.
The central aim is to determine whether specially designed ultrafast beams can reveal information about molecular and material dynamics that conventional spectroscopy cannot access. The project will begin with pump–probe spectroscopy, where one laser pulse excites a system and a second pulse tracks how it evolves, before extending these ideas towards multidimensional techniques such as 2D electronic spectroscopy.
The student will combine analytical theory with computational modelling to predict new structured-light signatures in ultrafast measurements. Particular emphasis will be placed on identifying experimentally observable effects and understanding what new information they provide about excited-state dynamics.
A key part of the project will be close collaboration with experimental groups, allowing theoretical predictions to guide measurements and, where possible, be tested directly in realistic molecular and material systems.
No prior experience of ultrafast or 2D spectroscopy is required; the necessary techniques will be developed during the PhD.
Entry requirements
The standard minimum entry requirement is 2:1 in Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics.
Mode of study
Full-time
Start date
1 October 2027
Additional Funding Information
This PhD project is in a competition for a Faculty of Science funded studentship. Funding is available to UK applicants and comprises ‘home’ tuition fees and an annual stipend for 3 years. The current UEA / institutional PhD stipend rate is £21,805 and will be subject to any agreed inflationary uplift for 2027/28.
