The Center was established in 2002 based on a U.S. Army Research Office MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) Grant to bring to together a team of chemists, physicists, mechanical engineers and materials scientists to explore detection of explosives in the environment. Under this MURI program, a suite of sensing strategies is being investigated to assess trace chemical detection of explosives and explosive-related compounds. This suite includes terahertz spectroscopic methods (THz), Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy (CRDS), Jet-REMPI (Resonance Enhanced Multi-Photon Ionization) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS). While each of these methods has been used to perform chemical identification previously, none has been pursued to assess the viability for environmental detection of trace explosives. The team assembled to address the scientific and technical challenges under this program is working to provide the basis for advanced and improved methods for field sensing of explosives.

This team includes groups from Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute (Prof. Xi-Cheng Zhang, Prof. Roland Kersting), Stanford University (Dr. Jay Jeffries), SRI International (Dr. David Crosley), Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (Dr. Robert Osiander, Dr. Joseph Miragliotta) and, of course, The Johns Hopkins University (Prof. Paul Dagdigian and Prof. James Spicer). The technical program of the Center is described in the accompanying pages as well as on the websites of the various participating investigators. Our team is working closely with a related research effort at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez under the direction of Prof. Sam Hernandez and is actively interacting with technical programs at the U.S. Army NVESD, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (Aberdeen Maryland) and NSWC Indian Head Division. These interactions have strengthened our efforts and have focused our activities to maximize the impact of our work.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number DAAD190210255.