Kale King Graduate Student, Department of Chemistry University of Georgia Learn more about the speaker Friday, November 19, 2021 - 11:30am Chemistry Building, Room 553 Physical Seminar Shock waves travelling through a material generate incredible amounts of pressure and cause irreversible changes in said material. Observing mechanical and chemical changes in an energetic material under shock is of particular interest in the study of detonations. Until recently, most experimental measurements of shock waves and shock induced chemistry have been limited to the nanosecond scale. Ultrafast Dynamic Ellipsometry (UDE) is a single-shot, picosecond scale probe of the transit of a shock through a condensed matter sample. UDE has been used to measure shock propagation through energetic materials and has been used in conjunction with transient absorption spectroscopy to observe reactivity in explosive media.