Edmonton Professor Wins Top Canadian Research Award

For pioneering experimentation at the borderlands of chemistry and physics

Ottawa, Ontario, March 5, 2002 – Wolfgang Jäger asks the kind of questions about the world that parents sometimes get from young children. Bedevillingly simple-sounding questions that probe at nature's essence. For example, how do you make water?

What separates the University of Alberta spectroscopist from most inquisitive big thinkers is that he's spent much of the last decade looking for an answer. Dr. Jäger built a state-of-the-art machine to study the subtle atomic-level dance between molecules that, for instance, transforms a gas into a liquid, and a group of atoms into an intricately folded life-giving protein.

It's pioneering experimentation at the borderlands of chemistry and physics for which Dr. Jäger is being awarded a 2002 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Steacie Fellowship – one of Canada's premier science and engineering prizes.

The award is one of six announced today by Maurizio Bevilacqua, the Secretary of State for Science, Research and Development, on behalf of Allan Rock, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for NSERC, and by Dr. Tom Brzustowski, President of NSERC.

"These winners will help Canada become one of the top five countries in the world for research and development – attracting and retaining the best and brightest minds," said Minister Rock. "This is an important part of making Canada more innovative and competitive in the global economy."

"NSERC Steacie Fellowships are awarded to Canada's most outstanding researchers," said Secretary of State Bevilacqua. "The winners continue to make a mark for themselves and for Canada on the international research scene. The NSERC Steacie will give them the opportunity and resources to develop their ideas to a new level of excellence."

"It's a very long path from the microscopic properties of a water molecule to the macroscopic properties of the bulk phase," Dr. Jäger says. "We're looking for the bridge between microscopic properties and macroscopic ones. And these changes occur because of molecular interactions."

The weak molecular interactions he studies are known as van der Waals forces. Getting a handle on these attractive forces between groups of atoms is like trying to overhear a whispered conversation in a crowded gym while you're standing far away. Yet it's the conversation that's keeping everyone there.

In the mid-1990s, Dr. Jäger and his research team spent nearly a year building what's known as a Fourier transform microwave spectrometer. It took another year to add a powerful Terahertz radiation source.

This high-tech, fridge-sized apparatus enables the researchers to carefully create small molecular clusters that often include helium atoms. These are hit with a microwave beam and the resultant spectral ("energy") emissions yield information about the rotation of the molecules in relation to one another.

"We need quantum mechanics to understand the spectral data," says Dr. Jäger. "You're really at the very fundamental level of chemistry and physics when you're doing this kind of spectroscopy. It's something radically different from the world we know."

Teasing understanding from the spectroscopic data requires high-powered number crunching. This year, Dr. Jäger's lab acquired a Beowulf cluster – 20 linked PCs, that with all their computing power still require 15 hours to calculate a single potential energy point of the up to 2000 that are required to create an image from the experimental data.

With his Steacie Fellowship, Dr. Jäger will extend his research into the nascent field of helium nanodroplet isolation spectroscopy.

He'll be leading the construction of a new machine – the first of its kind in Canada and one of only a few in the world – that will allow the researchers to trap molecules in super-fluid helium droplets and to analyze them inside this "ultra-cold nano-laboratory."

Operating at 0.38 Kelvin – close to what is the total absence of heat – this new spectroscopic technique will allow for the study of larger clusters of molecules, providing insight into processes that occur in solution.

For Dr. Jäger, it will be one step closer on the quantum path between single molecules and what we simply call water.

Contacts:

Dr. Wolfgang Jäger, (780) 492-5020, wolfgang.jaeger@ualberta.ca.

Arnet Sheppard, NSERC, (613) 995-5997, axs@nserc.ca.

The Prize

NSERC Steacie Fellowships are awarded to the most outstanding Canadian university scientists or engineers who have earned their doctorate within the last twelve years. Nominations are received by NSERC from universities across Canada and judged by a distinguished panel of independent experts. The award includes a payment to the University of Alberta towards Dr. Jäger's salary, and increased research funding from NSERC, freeing him to pursue his research full-time. In addition, for the first time this year, the winning Steacie Fellows have been invited to compete for a special Canada Foundation for Innovation Career Award. The announcement of these awards will be made later.

The five other award winners this year are:

Canada's Innovation Strategy

On February 12, 2002, the Government of Canada launched Canada's Innovation Strategy, two papers that lay out a plan to address skills and innovation challenges for the next decade. The paper released by Minister Rock was entitled Achieving Excellence: Investing in People, Knowledge and Opportunity. It proposes goals, targets and priorities for Canada over the next decade to: create knowledge and bring ideas to market more quickly; ensure a skilled workforce in the new economy; modernize business and regulatory policies while protecting the public interest; and strengthen communities by supporting innovation at the local level. Today's announcement supports this strategy.

For more information about Canada's Innovation Strategy or to obtain a copy of either Knowledge Matters: Skills and Learning for Canadians or Achieving Excellence: Investing in People, Knowledge and Opportunity, please call 1-800-CANADA (1-800-622-6232) or visit www.innovationstrategy.gc.ca.