I really like working on quantum chemistry. Some of my work is abstract - knowledge for knowledge's sake. The rest is "useful".
This is me teaching quantum mechanics to astronomers. I care about quantum chemistry because it can be used to simulate the spectrum of atoms and molecules. To detect molecules remotely we need to know what their spectra look like, and we currently don't. Solving this problem is the focus of my current main project, RASCALL - Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for ALL. I use RASCALL to simulate thousands of molecules using a clever combination of organic chemistry and quantum physics. You can find a preliminary version of the RASCALL database of molecular spectra here, the code here, and the paper here.
I worked alongside fourteen ORBYTS students to research titanium oxide, acetylene and methane. Pictured above is a molecular spectroscopic network which the kids developed as part of their work - that work will be featured in several peer-reviewed articles. Here's the first.
This is phosphine tunnelling. It has no real application yet but it's still cool.