The UPDICE consortium held its two-day summer meeting at University College London on the 4th and 5th August 2025. We were very grateful to have two of our International Advisory Board members, Prof Dan Neumark (Stanford University) and Prof Toshinori Suzuki (Kyoto University) present to join in discussions and give their valuable feedback on the Programme Grant. Scientific presentations from each Work Package and Cross Cutting Activity were delivered, followed by a joint symposium with the COSMOS group at UCL.

Andrew Orr-Ewing has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant with value of €3.2M over 5 years to study photochemical reactions in water droplets only a few micrometers in diameter.  These droplets have volumes a billion times smaller than a teaspoon of water.  In Earth’s atmosphere, droplets of this size are commonly found in clouds, fog and sea-spray, and they also form when organic particles from wildfires or human pollution condense water vapour from the surrounding air.

The ERC-funded Ultrafast Photochemistry in Organic Aerosols (PHAERO) project will explore how organic compounds in these microdroplets are affected by the UVA and UVB radiation in sunlight.  The work will deepen our understanding of how organic aerosol particles change their chemical composition and physical properties over time in the Earth’s atmosphere. These changes determine how these airborne particles influence the Earth’s climate by absorption or scattering of sunlight, causing net warming or cooling respectively. Using cutting-edge laser technology in a new laboratory funded by the ERC grant, the research will observe chemical changes in single droplets on ultrafast timescales corresponding to the breaking of chemical bonds or collisions between molecules in solution.  By developing a better understanding of how UV light interacts with molecules confined in small droplets, the project will help to unravel the fates of the particulate matter adversely affecting air quality in our cities, and emitted from the growing incidences of wildfires.  The outcomes will also find broader applications, for example in developing photochemistry in small droplets as a new strategy for sustainable synthesis of fine chemicals, or use of germicidal UVC irradiation to prevent the spread of pathogens in exhaled respiratory droplets. 

£1M has been awarded to the Dr Tom Oliver and US collaborator Prof Stephen Bradforth (University of Southern California) for a collaborative 3-year project entitled Quantum Coherence and Correlations in Condensed Phase Photochemical Reaction Dynamics. The international collaborative project is UK-led, and funding for studies at the University of Bristol are supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The Oliver and Bradforth groups will study how important light-driven reactions key to photocatalysis, protein damage and drug design have spin-selective product yields that cannot be explained within a conventional classical framework. The applications of quantum information science are rapidly expanding beyond quantum computing, but the ramifications for solution phase chemical reactions remain largely unexplored. New multidimensional ultrafast experimental techniques will be designed to read out the developing spin-state and its entanglement at much faster timescales than have hitherto been possible from magnetic resonance experiments – looking critically at chemical phenomena through a new lens. The innovative experiments will correlate spin with both electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom, exploiting recent cutting-edge developments in short-pulse broadband deep-ultraviolet laser sources. Their discoveries will reveal how the quantum mechanical state imprinted by light maps through into specific distributions of products crucially determining the overall outcome of photochemical reaction and potentially laying the foundations for new high-value chemical synthetic products.

This meeting aims to initiate a discussion between theoretical and experimental communities to enable better XFEL experiments in the future. 

Please register here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=MH_ksn3NTkql2rGM8aQVG9ezzH6P6jxLtBN9Ju8O6ZJURE8yR1k1NzdWUlhMV0RNM1hZR1FWOVNVQS4u 

A particular emphasis will be placed on the development of theoretical predictions before beamtimes to ensure that the most efficient strategies are adopted before measurements. This meeting will discuss the potential to use high-quality calculations of dynamics and experimental observables (both spectroscopic and scattering) for gas, solution phase and solid-state experiments. 

The meeting will also propose the creation of a forum to facilitate the connection between experimenters and theorists before the preparation of a proposal for an XFEL beamtime, permitting that vital calculations can be performed between beamtime acceptance and implementation (typically 6 months).

The meeting, jointly organized by members of the UK XFEL programme (https://xfel.ac.uk) and the EPSRC programme grants UPDICE  (https://updiceproject.com) and COSMOS (https://cosmosproject.co.uk), will bring worldwide experimental and theoretical experts in processes at XFEL.

Invited speakers include: 

Majed Chergui (Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste)
Sonia Coriani (DTU)
Nađa Došlić (Institut Ruđer Bošković Zagreb)
Matthew Foulkes (Imperial College)
Lina Fransen (U. Nantes)
William Glover (NYU Shanghai)
Daria Gorelova (U. Hamburg)
Niels Huse (U. Hamburg)
Rebecca Ingle (UCL)
Nanna List (KTH/U. Birmingham)
Gilberto Teobaldi (STFC)

A CECAM workshop took place from April 8 to 10 in Lausanne (Switzerland), co-organized by two members of the UPDICE consortium, Basile Curchod and Graham Worth, together with Federica Agostini (Paris-Saclay), Todd Martínez (Stanford), and Sara Bonella (CECAM-EPFL).

This workshop aimed to discuss the results of a recent prediction challenge addressed to the nonadiabatic dynamics community. The challenge consisted of predicting the photochemistry of cyclobutanone and the corresponding MeV-UED experimental signal and submitting an article on these results *before* the experiment was conducted at SLAC (Stanford). Fifteen articles were published in the Journal of Chemical Physics in response to this challenge (https://pubs.aip.org/collection/16531/Prediction-Challenge-Cyclobutanone-Photochemistry). The goal of this CECAM workshop was to discuss the results of this community challenge and agree on what worked and what did not work, building a roadmap for future developments in the field of nonadiabatic dynamics. Alice Green (Edinburgh) and Andrew Orr-Ewing (Bristol, lead of UPDICE) represented the experimental side of this challenge and supported the discussion on the calculation of experimental observables.

After feedback at the summer meeting last year, ECRs from each of the UPDICE groups have been leading tutorial-style online seminars each month, presenting on the experimental or theoretical methods used by their groups. Since the autumn, we have covered a range of topics, including: transient absorption, two-dimensional electronic, photoelectron and coulomb explosion imaging spectroscopies, as well as nonadiabatic dynamics calculations. The seminars are aimed to provide a working knowledge of our techniques to group members across the UPDICE grant and beyond, to improve understanding of the work in the different groups, and to help generate opportunities for collaborations.

The UPDICE consortium met on the 18th of February at the University of Bristol to discuss progress on Work Packages 2 and 3. There was a great turnout from all four partner institutions and many positive updates were highlighted during the meeting.

PDRAs from the UPDICE group met at the University of Bristol in February to take part in a presentation skills workshop, delivered by Island 41. The bespoke training focused on how to present with confidence, alongside skills such as vocal projection and engagement with Q&A sessions. The group then held one of their quarterly meetings where they presented research updates.

Over 70 people attended our second Women in Photochemistry Symposium, held on Wednesday 5 March at UCL. Nanna Holmgaard List (Stockholm, Sweden/Birmingham, UK),  Marina Kuimova (Imperial College London) and Martina Havenith (Bochum, Germany) talked about their research and shared insights into their career paths, including challenges they have faced and overcome, and they gave valuable tips for the aspiring early career researchers in the audience.

The symposium was timed to be in the week before International Women’s Day 2025 (Saturday 8 March) and was a joint UCL Chemistry and EPSRC UPDICE Programme Grant event, with additional support from the RSC Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group and the IOP Molecular Physics Group.

A large number of UPDICE group members attended the RSC Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group meeting in Leicester at the beginning of January. Talks and posters were presented by several of our PGR students and PDRAs.