Photo credit: Douglas A. Lockard — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Yuan T. Lee
born 1936 · Taiwan, United States · 20th century
Nobel Chemistry 1986
Taiwanese-American physical chemist; later president of Academia Sinica in Taipei.
Nobel Prize work
Lee perfected the crossed molecular beam technique, allowing chemists to observe the dynamics of single elementary reactions — how molecules collide, exchange atoms and redistribute energy. His experiments, recognised by the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry shared with Dudley Herschbach and John Polanyi, opened the era of state-to-state reaction dynamics.
Fields
Related topics
Potential energy surfaces, free-energy calculations
Connect molecular geometry to potential-energy landscapes, then use statistical mechanics and enhanced sampling to estimate free-energy differences and barriers.
Femtosecond spectroscopy, attosecond chemistry
How ultrashort laser pulses reveal molecular motion on femtosecond scales and electron dynamics on attosecond scales.