Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Unknown author — File:George Porter Nobel.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain

George Porter

1920–2002 · United Kingdom · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 1967

British physical chemist who co-invented flash photolysis, making it possible to observe free radicals and fleeting intermediates in real time.

Nobel Prize work

With Ronald Norrish, Porter developed flash photolysis: an intense light pulse disturbs chemical equilibrium and creates high concentrations of short-lived intermediates, which a second probing pulse then tracks. The technique let chemists watch radicals and excited states reacting on microsecond timescales, opening the study of extremely fast reactions — shared with Manfred Eigen.

Fields

Physical chemistry

Related topics

Reaction rate, reaction order

Measuring how fast concentrations change, and how the empirical order of a reaction is read from its concentration–time behaviour.

Excited-state dynamics

Follow the evolution of molecular wavepackets after photoexcitation, from ultrafast relaxation and conical intersections to measurable spectra and reaction outcomes.

Femtosecond spectroscopy, attosecond chemistry

How ultrashort laser pulses reveal molecular motion on femtosecond scales and electron dynamics on attosecond scales.

Chemists in the same field

Peter D. Mitchell (1920)William N. Lipscomb (1919)Jens C. Skou (1918)Jerome Karle (1918)Ilya Prigogine (1917)Rudolph A. Marcus (1923)