Development of single microdroplet techniques for fundamental chemical measurements

A significant number of current techniques that probe chemical and physical processes in single microdroplets focus on the measurement of long timescale processes. Probing short timescale processes (<100 μs) in single microdroplet domains has been largely prohibitive. Therefore, new experimental techniques are required to probe short timescale chemical transformations in microdroplets. In this thesis, experiments on single free-falling microdroplets that probe chemistry and physics of photoactivated reactions are reported. Single microdroplets are generated using drop-on-demand droplet generation and subsequently interrogated using various pulsed laser systems. The principal advantage of single microdroplet techniques is that each microdroplet is a chemically isolated and self-contained reaction vessel. This allows chemical and physical transformations to be probed with no crosscontamination between microdroplets.