Physicist Wang will work on small boron clusters

Lai-Sheng Wang, physics professor at Washington State University Tri-Cities with a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has been named a 2005 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Wang carries out his research at the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at PNNL. PNNL, located in Richland, Washington, is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Wang won the award for his studies of atomic clusters and multiply charged anions. The Guggenheim Foundation awards grants to advanced professionals with “significant performance records.” The purpose of the grant, according to the foundation, is to “help provide fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible. Grants are made freely. No special conditions attach to them, and fellows may spend their grant funds in any manner they deem necessary to their work.” Wang’s award is for $37,000 and will begin in October 2005.

“The work that I plan to focus on during the fellowship is to study small boron clusters and to develop a low temperature electrospray photoelectron spectroscopy instrument,” said Wang. “The boron cluster work will be done in collaboration with professor Manfred M. Kappes’ group at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. Our prior research showed that small boron clusters are all planar, while bulk boron consists of three-dimensional cages. However, at a certain cluster size, we expect a planar-to-cage transition. To answer this question will require us to combine our photoelectron spectroscopic experiment and ion mobility experiment, which will be done in Kappes’ group.”

Wang said there are many research groups in Europe, Asia and Australia that are interested in collaboration with the group at WSU/PNNL. “I plan to use the fellowship to travel to these places to initiate collaborative research activities,” he said. “The fellowship will give me more incentive, as well as the financial means, to attend to these activities.”

Wang joined WSU/PNNL in 1993. He is a world leader in the field of nanoclusters. His ground-breaking research involves surprising advances. His research team created the first all-metal aromatic molecules and discovered unexpected properties of extremely small particles of gold and boron. He also pioneered the study of multiply charged anions and created a research field of studying solution molecules in the gas phase. Wang has won numerous awards, including the 2005 Distinguished Faculty Award from the College of Sciences at WSU.

The Guggenheim fellowship program covers a diverse range of scholarships in 79 different fields, from the natural sciences to the creative arts. Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.