Research efforts in our group focus on the use of lasers, electron beams, microwaves, and magnetic devices to observe, control, accelerate, extract power, and precondition gas flows for subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic fluid dynamics, for propulsion applications, and for high sensitivity gas detection related to homeland defense. Our research group is recognized for inventing a wide variety of new diagnostics including:

• Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) for imaging of high speed flows
• Angularly Resolved Coherent Raman Scattering (ARCS) for species measurements
• Raman Excitation plus Laser Induced Electronic Fluorescence (RELIEF) for velocity imaging by molecular tagging in air
• Photo Activated Nonintrusive Tracking of Molecular Motion (PHANTOMM) for velocity imaging by molecular tagging in water
• Filtered Rayleigh Scattering (FRS) for imaging velocity, temperature, density, and flow structure as well as the application of atomic and molecular filters for species and temperature imaging
• Coherent Rayleigh Brillouin Scattering (CRBS) for point temperature measurements in gases and weakly ionized plasmas
• Radar REMPI for point measurements of species concentration
• Femtosecond Laser Electronic Excitation Tagging (FLEET) for velocity profile measurements in high-speed flows
• Femtosecond Laser Electric Field Measurement (FLEM) for nonintrusive measurements of electric field strength and orientation in virtually any gas or gas mixture

Recently, there has been much work on the development of plasma and MHD related flow control technologies and on the development of high-power electron beam-driven hypersonic ground test facilities for high Mach number testing. Our group also has strong collaborations with Boeing, Lockheed, Sandia National Labs, Air Force Research Labs, MSE Technology Applications, and numerous small companies through SBIR and STTR efforts.