"Cloudy and Hazy Worlds in the Era of JWST"

Aerosols are everywhere. I will discuss two avenues where our understanding of photochemical hazes and condensation clouds has advanced for exoplanetary atmospheres. Both kinds of aerosols fundamentally shape the atmospheric chemistry of a variety of exoplanets, with subsequent impacts on observations from a variety of facilities, including JWST. First, I will present results on the properties of photochemical haze particles produced from laboratory studies and the ways we may begin untangling these properties with JWST’s instrumentation for the most promising planetary targets. Second, I will focus on updates to our understanding of exoplanet clouds. Clouds made of silicate materials are thought to be the dominant cloud species that affects our interpretations of hot Jupiters, but the underlying laboratory data typically used for such interpretation does not fully capture the complexity of these materials. I will discuss my recent efforts to properly account for this complexity by considering mineral polymorphs and non-spherical cloud particle models. Properly accounting for the full chemical and physical complexity of both condensate and photochemical aerosol particles in exoplanet atmospheres will let us use them as atmospheric tracers of planetary conditions.