The management site visits have allowed the management team to obtain an overview of all research activities not only those directly related to MUST. With this knowledge we can extend and complete our current view of MUST’s interconnections and general research directions. Again, we employ a graphical representation to visualize the most important scientific challenges and technological developments towards which MUST is working.

MUST was established to work on solar light harvesting through charge separation, direct fuel production, to shed light on the functioning of several selected and relevant bio-molecules, and novel strongly correlated materials. All these research directions require that our knowledge advances on several fundamental levels; amongst them are electron dynam-ics and dynamical processes at interfaces, as they are of the utmost importance for almost all artificial light harvesting schemes. Of fundamental importance for understanding the functions of bio-molecules is the underlying structural dynamics as well as to some extent reaction dynamics. Finally, MUST is engaged in studying novel materials and their use in ultrafast switching and related applications. A crucial ingredient to gain further knowledge in these fields is an elaborate and high precision theoretical modeling and an appropriate spectroscopic tool.

MUST devotes a major effort to further extend our knowledge into the directions described and for that purpose several groups are developing high-fidelity simulation tools as well as several novel spectroscopic tools. In the individual reports, written by the 15 PIs, progress along these lines will be described. It is only nine months since the NCCR MUST was launched and many groups are still partly engaged with setting up the required infrastruc-ture. Some groups, however, have already now reported on some important milestones.