Laser Spectroscopy and Chemical Reaction Dynamics of Gas Phase Transition Metal Species

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Professor Weisshaar is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program for investigations of the spectroscopy and dynamics of small gas phase species containing transition metal atoms. Little is currently known experimentally about the electronic structure of such molecules, nor is there much existing information on how reactant electronic structure controls chemical reactivity in simple transition metal systems. Laser vaporization of metal targets permits the formation of molecular beams for the study of the chemistry of gas phase metal species without the complications of attached solvent molecules. Resonantly-enhanced two photon ionization is used to investigate the spectroscopy and structure of transition metal dimers, trimers, oxides, and ligated atoms. These same techniques are used to prepare transition metal ions and characterize the resulting internal state distributions for subsequent dynamical studies as a function of initial ion internal state. Other dynamical studies include investigations of dissociative autoionization in metal dimers and time-resolved probing of molecules absorbed on small metal clusters.