MEASURING AND CONTROLLING MOLECULE-SURFACE COLLISIONS USING PICO-EV COHERENT MANIPULATIONS OF MOLECULAR ROTATIONAL ORIENTATION

MEASURING AND CONTROLLING MOLECULE-SURFACE COLLISIONS USING PICO-EV COHERENT MANIPULATIONS OF MOLECULAR ROTATIONAL ORIENTATION

10/04/2022

חדר סמינרים פקולטי

12:30

Prof. Gil Alexandrowicz Chemistry Department, Swansea University, UK

סמינר כימיה פיסיקלית  ואנליטית

Measuring and controlling molecule-surface collisions using pico-eV coherent manipulations of molecular rotational orientation

In this talk I will briefly present two recent research projects, both of which make use of magnetic fields to coherently manipulate the rotational and spin quantum states of a molecule during a molecule-surface collision. In one project, magnetic manipulations performed on a molecular beam of H2 colliding with a salt surface, were used to extract for the first time an empirically derived scattering matrix, the elements of which describe changes to the molecular wavefunction (magnitude and phase) during the scattering event[1].  In the second project, coherent manipulations on a D2 molecular beam were used to change the rotational orientation of the molecules before they reach a copper surface, and alter the probability of a rotational de-excitation collision J=2->J=0. In this case a manipulation scheme which is based on pico-eV energy splitting, controls the outcome of a rotational energy loss which is 9 orders of magnitude larger.  Both projects provide challenging and important benchmarks for theoretical modelling of molecule-surface interactions.

[1] Nature Communications 11, 3110 (2020).