Rensselaer research is being showcased this week at the 230th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Washington, D.C. Eighteen members of the Rensselaer community are presenting their work, including a special invited lecture by President Shirley Ann Jackson and a terahertz technology symposium organized by Professor Xi-Cheng Zhang.

President Jackson is speaking at an event celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ACS Scholars Program, which is designed to be a catalyst for African American, Hispanic/Latino, and American Indian students seeking to pursue undergraduate college degrees in chemical sciences and chemical technology. Her talk focuses on the urgent need to build the next generation of scientists, which she asserts requires fostering a national plan and a national will to succeed.

Photo of Xi-Cheng Zhang by RPI/Mark McCarty

Xi-Cheng Zhang, the J. Erik Jonsson ’22 Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Terahertz Research at Rensselaer, and his co-chair, Charles Schmuttenmaer, professor of chemistry at Yale University, were invited to plan the terahertz technology symposium to introduce T-rays to the analytical chemistry community.  T-rays are the next wave in imaging and sensing technology. Based on the terahertz (THz) region of the electromagnetic spectrum — defined by frequencies from 0.1 to 10 THz, just between infrared light and microwave radiation — T-rays are opening the door to a wide variety of applications.

“The last 20 years have seen a revolution in THz science and technology,” Zhang says. “It is an extremely attractive research field with interest from sectors as diverse as the semiconductor materials, medical, manufacturing, space and defense industries.”

Until recently, researchers have had great difficulty harnessing the potential of the THz region, largely because of a lack of suitable radiation sources. Zhang will demonstrate new advances achieved at Rensselaer that allow for the sensing of extremely small objects on the nanometer scale, as well as at large distances of more than 100 meters — an essential improvement for national security applications such as remote sensing of explosives. He will also discuss recent collaborations with NASA, where THz imaging successfully detected defects in space shuttle foam.  See press release.

In addition to Zhang, Rensselaer faculty members presenting at the ACS conference include: Jonathan Dordick, the Howard P. Isermann Professor and chair, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering; Ravi Kane, the Merck Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering; Sanat Kumar, professor of chemical and biological engineering, Linda McGown, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology; and Sanford Sternstein, the William Weightman Walker Professor of Polymer Engineering and director of the Center for Composite Materials and Structures. In addition, 11 Rensselaer graduate students, post-docs, and research associates will be presenting papers and posters at the conference.

Published August 29, 2005