Professor Arthur Suits of Wayne State University is supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program for research to develop a new direction in the study of ion spectroscopy and collision dynamics by exploiting the advantages of the velocity imaging technique and its ready application to both electron and ion velocity measurements. Three tasks are being carried out: 1) velocity map imaging is being used to study ionizing crossed-beam collisions of excited atoms (H* and He*), to ultimately obtain new spectroscopic information on protonated species such as H3+, CH5+, H3O+, and others; 2) rotationally-resolved electron energy spectra for a range of atom-atom and atom-molecule scattering systems are being obtained to provide insight into the dynamics of these reactions; and 3) prior work on the decay dynamics of superexcited states and ion-pair dissociation to investigate non-adiabatic processes, electron correlation, and Rydberg-valence coupling is being extended. The work is having a broader impact both on the training of future generations of physical scientists but also on our basic understanding of chemical dynamics.
