Khashayar Ghandi

Research

Our group's research includes (but is not limited to) both fundamental aspects and applications of physical chemistry and chemical physics in energy, material science and green chemistry. Family antimatters is the name my research students coined for our group since some of our research are based on antimatters at particle accelerators.

We have three general areas of research interests:

1. Fundamental aspects of physical chemistry/chemical physics on topics such as novel types of chemical bonds, kinetic isotope effects on reactions of state selected molecules, developing new spectroscopic techniques to study intermediates, chemistry under extreme conditions, and the role of external fields on electronic structure in atoms, molecules and material as well as modeling chemical reactions.
2. Material science, energy transformation and green chemistry.
3. Applications of physical chemistry tools to “other” disciplines. These studies are in collaboration with colleagues in “other” fields, including biology, medicine, commerce and engineering.

We have been funded by NSERC, CFI and industrial grants for research concerning fundamental science, energy and environment, Green Chemistry, CO2 capture and its use in applications. Our investigations of Generation IV Energy Technologies has led to a successful collaborative research and development grant for years.

Our research is carried out both at a conventional chemistry laboratory which includes computational work such as investigating electronic structures, quantum field theory, Monte Carlo simulations, as well as hands on lab experiments in our department, scientific mechanical design, Spectroscopic studies, synthesis of novel material as well as data analysis. We obtain a large amount of data that need to be analyzed after each beam time (beam time is the time each year that we get to spend at particle accelerator facilities). Some of our research is also carried out at our lab in Guelph. For some of our work we must do experiments at international facilities in Canada, Europe and Japan. Therefore, my group and I travel regularly to TRIUMF national laboratory in Vancouver, ISIS at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, ELYSE in university of Paris / Saclay and JPARC in Japan. In some of particle accelerators we use the beams 24 hours per day which means we need to take shifts (all of us including the supervisor) and work as a team to collect as much data as we can. Therefore, during our beam times, graduate students and I work all together shoulder-to-shoulder in the lab to help each student to do well. We could work on different projects for different students at different times but we all work for that particular student project (the student do most of the experiment design in consultation with the rest of group) at that time. This will give us a sense of team and family that is probably why my students called our group name family antimatters. We use high performance computing clusters for our calculations.

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