Professor Carl Lineberger is supported by a grant from The Experimental Physical Chemistry Program to continue his research in the structure and dynamics of ions and ionic clusters. Dr. Lineberger will use state-of-the-art molecular beam, laser spectroscopic, and mass spectroscopic methods to obtain information which is of fundamental importance in the understanding of molecular bonding. Tunable laser photodissociation in a coaxial beam machine will be employed as a probe of the vibrational spectra of ionic complexes and the rate of energy coupling between an ionic chromophore and the weak ion-cluster bond. A supersonic expansion ion source connected to the coaxial beam machine will enable the production of moderate-sized cluster ions, whose infrared dissociation will be probed in high resolution. Other experiments will expand our experimental knowledge of dipole bound states of negative ions by observing unstable molecules via their presumed dipole bound states. Ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy will be used to study a number of organic diradicals, as well as to investigate the electronic structure of neutral metal clusters. In addition, evaporative loss of monomers from cluster ions following photoabsorption will be used to obtain low resolution infrared absorption spectra of mass-selected cluster ions.
