Cold Chemistry with Cold Molecules (Prof. E. Narevicius)

  • Datum: 21.04.2015
  • Uhrzeit: 14:30 - 16:00
  • Vortragende(r): Professor Dr. Edvardas Narevicius, Chemical Physics Department, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
  • Raum: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
  • Gastgeber: 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.

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