Ultrafast Nonlinear Optical Diagnostics: Cross-Cutting Innovations for the Study of Combustion, Fluid Dynamics, and Catalytic Materials.

In many fields of modern research, the critical need for the nonintrusive measurements of physical scalars and chemistry with high accuracy and precision remains a bottleneck for progress towards the improvement or validation of predictive models.  Innovative techniques are required to provide incisive tests of our fundamental understanding of many important processes in the physical sciences and engineering.  For example, in combustion the well-known feedback between turbulent flow and combustion chemistry requires “gold-standard” benchmark datasets of correlated chemical speciation, temperature, and flow-field.  In heterogeneous gas/surface catalysis, simultaneous information is required on molecular surface species, intermediates, surface chemical state, and near-surface gas-phase speciation to fully inform microkinetic models.  In hypersonic turbulent flows, high-repetition-rate measurements of spatially resolved thermal, chemical, and flow field are needed to compare time-resolved dynamics and near-wall turbulence effects to fluid dynamics modeling.  In this talk, some recent developments in ultrafast nonlinear optical imaging from my lab will first be covered.   Following this, a vision for a powerful new suite of nonlinear optical and multiplexed approaches to answer fundamental questions in catalysis, combustion, and turbulence will be envisaged.