Merkt Lab

Research focus

ERC Advanced Grant · 2016

Cold Ion Chemistry - Experiments within a Rydberg Orbit

To date no experiment has investigated ion-molecule reactions at temperatures significantly below about 20 K, for two reasons: (i) Cooling the translational and internal degrees of freedom of ions and molecules is extremely challenging. (ii) Even very weak stray electric fields accelerate the ions. A potential difference of only 1 mV across the reaction volume imparts a kinetic energy of 1 meV to ions, which corresponds to a temperature of about 12 K. Quantum mechanical effects arising from the translational and the frozen or hindered rotational motion of the reactants in the intermolecular potential are only expected to be significant below 20 K and have therefore not been observed yet in…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.