Presidential Young Investigator Award/Fourier Transform Coherent Raman Spectroscopy of Molecules

费尔克博士计划开展一个分为三个领域的研究计划，所有研究领域都涉及喷射冷却物种的时间积分和皮秒时间分辨光谱学。首先，皮秒光谱学将应用于研究分子电子基态流形中的振动能流。他感兴趣的第二个主要领域是(最近观察到的)旋转相干现象在高分辨率分子光谱中的应用，以及对大物种旋转状态变化碰撞的研究。在光谱研究中，旋转相干效应将被用来获得分子络合物和团簇的旋转常数的亚多普勒、兆赫分辨率测量，目的是阐明物种的结构。他感兴趣的第三个领域是喷射冷却的孤立过渡金属配位络合离子的光谱和动力学。这项工作很重要，因为它涉及到观察分子内的能量流动。振动能量一旦以特定的模式沉积，在分子中重新分配的速度有多快，以及它最终在哪里结束等问题，对于理解化学反应是至关重要的。

Dr. Felker plans to carry out a program of research which falls into three areas, all involving time-integrated and picosecond time-resolved spectroscopy on jet-cooled species. In the first, picosecond spectroscopy will be applied to the study of vibrational energy flow in the electronic ground-state manifolds of molecules. His second major area of interest is the application of the (recently observed) rotational coherence phenomenon to high-resolution molecular spectroscopy and to studies of the rotational state-changing collisions of large species. In the spectroscopic studies, rotational coherence effects will be used to obtain sub-Doppler, megahertz resolution measurements of the rotational constants of molecular complexes and clusters, with the aim of elucidating the structures of the species. His third area of interest is the spectroscopy and dynamics of jet-cooled, isolated transition-metal coordination complex ions. This work is important because it involves looking at energy flow within molecules. Questions such as how rapidly vibrational energy once deposited in a specific mode is redistributed in a molecule and just where it ends up are of fundamental importance to understanding chemical reactivity.