Research

Current Research

Methane has been identified as a major green house gas contributor. Currently, it’s believed to contribute 30 to 40% of planet warming. Understanding its role in the atmosphere has become crucial for mitigated the affects of climate change.

As a PREP postdoc with the University of Maryland working with Joseph Hodges at NIST, I am currently designing and building a temperature controlled vacuum chamber, for a ringdown spectrometer. We are targeting the MERLIN manifold with expectations of better understanding the role methane plays at high altitude.

CRDS of Radicals in de Laval Nozzle

For my first postdoc position, I worked at the University of Missouri, with Arthur Suits. I worked on the CRDS instrument which studies the cross sectional flow exhaust from a de Laval Nozzle. The supersonic expansion of the flow allowed for radicals of astronomic interest at low temperatures.

Line Shapes of Acetylene

Using our GPS referenced frequency comb-stabilized extended cavity laser diode setup at Stony Brook University we have measured the nu1 + nu3 band of Acetylene in high resolution. Our focus started with making measurements of the ortho-para dependence of self-pressure broadening. Our results refuted the controversial results of Iwakuni et al.

[1]

E. C. Gross, K. A. Tsang, and T. J. Sears, The Journal of Chemical Physics 154, 054305 (2021).

Hydroxyl Radical Kinetics

With the GPMS group at BNL, work was carried out on understanding the kinetics on the photodissociation of hydrogen peroxide, and the hydroxyl radical’s reactions with ethylene using optical-heterodyne molecular spectroscopy.

J. P. A. Lockhart, E. C. Gross, T. J. Sears, and G. E. Hall, Chemical Physics Letters 711, 148 (2018).

J. P. A. Lockhart, E. C. Gross, T. J. Sears, and G. E. Hall, International Journal of Chemical Kinetics (2019).

Radical Spectroscopy

I started my graduate studies with the Gas Phase Molecular Spectroscopy group at Brookhaven National Lab, in Upton, NY. Our interest at the time was to study the reactions leading to soot formation in fuel-rich hydrocarbon flames. We used doppler-limited FM-modulated transient techniques in a 2m Harriott to measure both spectroscopic and kinetic data on the ethynyl free radical.

A. T. Le, E. C. Gross, G. E. Hall, and T. J. Sears, 16 (2018).

E. C. Gross, A. T. Le, G. E. Hall, and T. J. Sears (2020) [in-proceeding].

MuSun (PSI, Switzerland)

(2010 – 2014)

The MuSun experiments goal to measure the capture rate of the muon on the deuteron. As an undergraduate student at Regis, a lot of my time was spent on development of cryogenic preamplifier. This allowed the signals to be more noise immune, increasing signal-to-noise and limiting the factors temperature and capacitance noise.

R. Ryan, et al., Journal of Instrumentation 9, P07029 (2014).

Muon g-2 (Fermilab)