Dr. Vaida plans to continue and expand a program of research aimed at the development of a detailed picture of reactive excited electronic surfaces for polyatomic molecules. Reactive molecular systems where excited state lifetimes are shortended by chemical processes provide a challenging spectroscopic problem. She has developed an extensive experimental program to investigate these interesting chemical systems. This approach involves a combination of spectroscopic techniques such as electronic absorption, multiphoton ionization and photodissociation in conjunction with sample preparation in the controlled environment of a supersonic jet. The information obtained experimentally is to be used with extensive theoretical modeling aiming for a complete description of the structure and dynamics of reactive excited electronic surfaces. The work is important because of the focus on developing a quantitative understanding of chemical reactivity for model molecular systems. The combination of high resolution experiemtnal results and detailed theoretical treatment is expected to provide a cosistent picture of the dynamics of a number of important reactions.
