Cold Chemistry with Cold Molecules (Prof. E. Narevicius)
- Date: Apr 21, 2015
- Time: 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Professor Dr. Edvardas Narevicius, Chemical Physics Department, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
- Room: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
- Host: MPQ
There has been a long-standing quest to observe chemical reactions at low temperatures where reaction rates and pathways are governed by quantum mechanical effects or long range interactions.
This field of Quantum Chemistry has been dominated, to date, by theory,
with almost no experiments. The difficulty so far, has been to realize
low enough collisional velocities between neutral reactants, so that the
de Broglie wavelength becomes long enough for the quantum wave nature
to emerge as a dominating effect. We will discuss how reaction
temperatures on the order of several milli Kelvin can be achieved
without laser cooling by merging cold and fast molecular and atomic
beams. We will see striking differences between cold atom-atom and
atom-molecule collisions where internal molecular degrees of freedom
play a key role in defining the long-range interactions.