Queen’s University professor Tucker Carrington is looking at how molecules fall apart when they are excited by light, knowledge that could lead to research into things such as new renewable energy sources.

Tucker Carrington didn’t set out to solve the global warming problem. That may simply be one of the by-products of the work he’s doing.

A professor at Queen’s University, Carrington specializes in computational chemical dynamics. That means he uses computers and software to study the way molecular particles move. It may not sound hard, but those particles can really get around.

"Classically, to describe the way a single particle moves, you needed to know its position and its momentum as a function of time," he says. "It can be in one place at one time, but if you have to use quantum mechanics, you have to at the same time monitor all possible values of that position."

In other words, he has to come up with a way to use software that will show all the possible positions a particle could be in at any given moment.

The approach:

"I don’t do any experiments," Carrington says. "It’s mostly understanding, applying and in some cases developing algorithms and using them to do chemistry."

He’s also writing software that can do these kinds of calculations. He uses the most powerful computers available at Queen’s to run through his equations.

Carrington says the key to his research is looking at how molecules fall apart when they are excited by light. Quantum mechanics, after all, is based on the relationship between matter and energy, and if molecules can be manipulated by lasers it could have a big impact on how energy is generated, shared and stored.

"I think probably the most likely quick application would be in understanding reactions that occur in the atmosphere," he says. "To understand things like global warming — we have to understand what [chemical] reactions happen, how quickly they happen, how they’re coupled together."

Once we have that understanding, for example, it could be easier to harness the power of those molecular processes to generate more renewable energy sources and conserve the planet's non-renewable resources. Carrington says being able to manipulate matter at the sub-atomic level could also lead to new kinds of energy-storage devices or even the development of more effective pharmaceutical drugs.

Carrington doesn’t work with these kinds of specific goals in mind, however. He’s focused right now on developing the computational tools to study molecules, not the end result of what that knowledge could bring.

"I’m writing computer programs that enable us to do these calculations. Others could use them, but I’ve not put a lot of effort into creating user-friendly software," he says, adding, "I’d be happy to provide programs we [he and his grad students] created."

Timeline:

About three years ago, Carrington says he was able to study a specimen of methane gas that contained five atoms. He’s now struggling to do the same thing with a molecular sample that contains six atoms. The more atoms he can study at one time to determine their behaviour under a variety of conditions, the more likely his work can be applied to real-world problems.

"My principal interest is in pushing the development of the computational tools," he says. "Once I get something that’s good enough to study systems [molecular specimens] with six atoms, I’m not going to stop and say, ‘Okay, let’s pull out all the systems with six atoms I can imagine.’ I’m going to move on to seven."

In other words, Carrington is not just interested in studying the sub-atomic state of a specific specimen, but also in coming up with software-based methods to study increasingly dense or more complex specimens.

In some ways, Carrington’s work began while he was still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, where a renowned physical chemist named John Polanyi asked him to take part in a summer project.

"I had been more physics than chemistry-oriented, but that was a decisive moment," he says.

Carrington ended up focusing his graduate school studies on chemistry, and his collaboration with Polanyi — who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1986 — deepened.

"Partly because of my interaction with him, I learned more and became interested in these problems," Carrington says.

Reality Check:

Organizations like Greenpeace Canada are on the front lines of tackling issues such as global warming, but that doesn’t mean the organization isn’t interested in the kind of research scientists like Carrington is doing. Jane Story, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace Canada in Toronto, says the important thing is not counting on a breakthrough.

"There’s already a lot of existing technology available to combat global warming and climate change that is simple and usable," she points out. "We don’t always want to defer for something that may take years to develop."

Carrington says the progress he’s making might look slow to the outside world, but it builds on all the progress that has been made by the physical chemists who came before him. Like Isaac Newton, he sees himself as standing on the shoulders of giants — and his work should help with research being conducted by others.

"The software that we develop and use has been done from scratch — that is, we don’t buy a program and then modify it," he says. "But we’ve worked to develop ideas that already existed before I started."