Mertonian Kasra Amini awarded the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant
Dr Kasra Amini (2012) has been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The award and related funding total €2.5 million, awarded to support Kasra’s research in molecular physics over the next five years.
The ERC Starting Grant is awarded to exceptional early-career researchers to support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, to help them to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas. The grant provides funding of up to €1.5 million, with an additional €1 million for start-up costs, such as the acquisition of major equipment, over a five-year funding period.
Dr Kasra Amini is currently a group leader at the Max-Born-Institute (MBI) for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy within the Forschungsverbund Berlin. He and his team will use the grant to develop an innovative technique that will add the energy dimension to existing ultrafast electron scattering measurements through a technique called time- and energy-resolved electron scattering (TERES). The TERES approach will allow the exploration of intricate coupled dynamics between electrons and atomic nuclei in gas-phase molecules and thin molecular films.
Kasra joined MBI in 2021 and is completing his habilitation in the physics department of the Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher and research fellow at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), Barcelona (2017 – 2021), and at the University of Warsaw (2017-2018). He completed his PhD with distinction in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford (Merton College) in 2017 under the supervision of Professor Mark Brouard.
Since joining MBI, Kasra established the high repetition rate ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) research group. Together with PhD student Fernando Rodriguez Diaz, and supported by initial seed funding from MBI, he built a state-of-the-art, high repetition rate UED instrument capable of tracking atomic changes in molecules and condensed matter with sub-atomic picometre and femtosecond spatio-temporal resolution. Chemical reactions often involve electrons in molecules absorbing energy, which can cause the molecules to change their structure. These changes, though minuscule and extremely fast, are crucial to the reaction's outcome and the molecule’s function. Traditional methods have struggled to capture these rapid dynamics with the level of detail required to completely understand them.
The ERC project will address this challenge by combining two powerful tools: ultrafast electron diffraction (UED), which captures structural changes in molecules, and electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), which provides information about electronic states. Kasra and his team will develop this novel technique, called time- and energy-resolved electron scattering (TERES), to simultaneously monitor both the electronic and structural changes that occur during a reaction. This allows scientists to effectively create a 'quantum molecular movie', offering a detailed, real-time look into how molecules change structure, dissipate energy and redistribute charge densities at the quantum level. This potential breakthrough could have wide-ranging applications in various fields, from improving materials science to advancing our knowledge of fundamental photochemical processes. By providing a clearer picture of how molecules react and interact, TERES could lead to innovations in technology, energy, and beyond, opening new doors for scientific discovery.
