Amino acid insertions and deletions (indels) are among the most common protein mutations and necessitate changes to a protein's backbone geometry. Examining how indels affect protein folding stability (and especially how indels can increase stability) can help reveal the role of backbone energetics on stability and introduce new protein engineering strategies. Tsuboyama et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report the first application of broadband time-resolved pump-probe ellipsometry to study the ultrafast dynamics of the photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) in vanadium dioxide (VO) thin films driven by 35 fs laser pulses. This novel technique enables the direct measurement of the time-resolved evolution of the complex pseudodielectric function of VO during the IMT. We have identified distinct thermal and nonthermal dynamics in the photoinduced IMT, which critically depends on the pump wavelength and fluence, while providing a detailed temporal and spectral phase map.
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