Title: Cold chemical reactions with laser- and sympathetically cooled ions in ion traps

Time: Today, October 26, 10.15 to 11.00

Place: Fysisk Auditorium

Abstract:

The recent progress in the generation of translationally cold atoms and molecules in the gas phase has enabled us to study chemical processes in a new physical regime. We have recently developed a novel experiment which takes advantage of the unusual properties of translationally cold, Coulomb-crystallised ions in ion traps to study reactive ion-neutral collisions at very low energies. Our setup combines a linear Paul trap for the laser- and sympathetic cooling of atomic and molecular ions with a quadrupole-guide velocity selector for the generation of translationally cold neutrals at kinetic energies of Ekin/kB~1 K. In the talk we review recent results on selected reactions with cold atomic and molecular ions, discuss the features of our method and explore further developments towards fully quantum-state selected reactive collision experiments in the mK range.