Prof. Gaynor (Chemistry, joined summer 2023) develops cutting-edge ultrafast spectroscopy at the physics-chemistry frontier. Directions: (1) Attochemistry — new ultrafast laser spectroscopies operating on attosecond to femtosecond timescales to directly measure how electron spin and orbital motion couple to molecular geometry (spin-vibronic coupling) in chiral molecules and materials of interest for energy conversion and spintronics; (2) Multidimensional nonlinear spectroscopy (2D electronic spectroscopy, 2D vibrational) to track energy and charge transfer immediately after photoexcitation; (3) Instrumentation-first approach: building novel attosecond transient absorption and correlation spectroscopy apparatus from scratch, enabling entirely new observables (e.g., electron-nuclear and spin-orbital correlations). INQUIRE faculty affiliate. Beckman Young Investigator 2025 ($600k, 4 yrs); Packard Fellow 2025 ($875k, 5 yrs).

Leone's group generates attosecond and few-femtosecond XUV/X-ray pulses to track electron dynamics and charge migration in molecules and materials in real time, pushing time-domain spectroscopy toward the natural timescale of electronic motion.

Witte's group builds table-top extreme-ultraviolet sources via high-harmonic generation and combines them with coherent diffractive imaging (ptychography) to visualize 3D nanostructures, such as multilayer IC features, at resolutions well below the diffraction limit of visible light. The lab also works on lensless microscopy, photoacoustic imaging/metrology, and ultrafast electron/HHG dynamics, sitting at the interface of fundamental attosecond-adjacent light-matter physics and applied nanometrology; the group is actively hiring as it ramps up at TU Delft.