Young people these days are very concerned about the environment. There is also a great deal of interest in using technology to improve energy efficiency. Many physics students share these concerns and would like to find ways to use their scientific and quantitative skills to help overcome the environmental challenges that the world faces. This may be particularly true for female students. Showing physics students how they can contribute to environmental and energy solutions while doing scientific research which excites them is expected to attract more physicists to work on these very important problems and to retain more of the best and the brightest in physical science. This is a major thrust of the 'Gathering Storm' report, the 'American Competitiveness Initiative' report, and several other studies. With these concerns in mind, the American Physical Society (APS) and more specifically, the newly formed APS Topical Group on Energy Research and Applications (GERA), organized and conducted a one-day workshop for graduate students and post docs highlighting the contributions that physics-related research can make to meeting the nation's energy needs in environmentally friendly ways. A workshop program committee was formed and met four times by conference call to determine session topics and to …

Scientists at the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley are continuously reinventing synchrotron investigations of physical chemistry and chemical physics with vacuum ultraviolet light. One of the unique aspects of a synchrotron for chemical physics research is the widely tunable vacuum ultraviolet light that permits threshold ionization of large molecules with minimal fragmentation. This provides novel opportunities to assess molecular energetics and reaction mechanisms, even beyond simple gas phase molecules. In this perspective, significant new directions utilizing the capabilities at the Chemical Dynamics Beamline are presented, along with an outlook for future synchrotron and free electron laser science in chemical dynamics. Among the established and emerging fields of investigations are cluster and biological molecule spectroscopy and structure, combustion flame chemistry mechanisms, radical kinetics and product isomer dynamics, aerosol heterogeneous chemistry, planetary and interstellar chemistry, and secondary neutral ion-beam desorption imaging of biological matter and materials chemistry.