Welcome to the Johnson Lab!

members of the Johnson Lab, summer 2007

    We are interested in exploring fundamental chemical paradigms for charge accommodation and transport mediated by solvent in a regime where each solvent molecule counts.  Our approach involves building custom laser spectrometers that rely on "ion bunching" mass spectrometry to isolate a precise number of solvent molecules around a solute ion.  The nature of the excess proton and electron in water are of special interest because it has been difficult to explain their behaviors in the macrosopic scale, and clusters provide us with qualitatively new pictures of how to think about them.  Reaction intermediates and nanoscale water are also under study, and we have very recently initiated a new  apparatus designed to study water-mediated chemistry at play in Earth's atmosphere.