Hamburg Photon Science Colloquium | Understanding the primary reactions of hydrogen

by Frédéric Merkt (Physical Chemistry Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

Friday 19 May 2017, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

CFEL, Bldg. 99 (DESY Hamburg)

Hydrogen is the most abundant element of the universe, where it can be found in atomic and molecular forms, and in neutral and charged states. The talk will present experiments on molecular hydrogen that exploit techniques developed in the context of research on (ultra-)cold molecules. We try to characterize the elementary reactions through which the hydrogen molecules are formed and to measure their energy-level structure with a precision sufficiently high to test the most advanced calculations on these systems. For this purpose we have developed dedicated radiation sources and chip-based experimental platforms to control the external and internal degrees of freedom of molecules.