Tutorials in Molecular Reaction Dynamics

Author Information

Mark Brouard undertook his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford with Professor M. J. Pilling, before moving to a postdoctoral position with Professor J. P. Simons at Nottingham University. He was appointed to a lectureship there before moving back to Oxford in 1993, where he is now a Professor of Physical Chemistry and a Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College. His main interests lie in experimental studies of gas phase photodissociation and reaction dynamics, with a particular interest in angular momentum polarization effects.

Homepage: http://brouard.chem.ox.ac.uk/index.html

Claire Vallance received B.Sc.(hons) and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, before moving to the University of Oxford, where she currently holds the joint posts of University Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and Tutorial Fellow in Physical Chemistry at Hertford College. Her current research interests include reaction dynamics, application of velocity and spatial-map imaging to mass spectrometry, and the development of laser spectroscopic techniques for microfluidics applications.

Homepage: http://vallance.chem.ox.ac.uk/

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Matthew Addicoat completed his Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide with Professor Greg Metha. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University. His other research interests include transition metal clusters and finding efficient means to search potential energy surfaces.

Michael Collins (Ph.D., University of Sydney) gained postdoctoral experience at MIT, ANU, the University of Chicago, and Cambridge, before taking up a permanent position at ANU. His research interests have included semi-classical mechanics and solitary wave phenomena in molecules and crystals, but are now concentrated on molecular potential energy surfaces and on the energetics of large molecules, crystals and surfaces.

Homepage: http://chemistry.anu.edu.au/people/professor-michael-collins

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Anthony J. H. M. Meijer (Ph.D., University of Nijmegen) is a senior lecturer in Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Sheffield. Before his appointment in Sheffield he was a postdoctoral researcher at UCL (UK) and WSU in Detroit (USA). His research interests lie in quantum reaction dynamics in general, with an emphasis on using parallel computers to tackle gas-surface and gas-phase reactions. The reactions studied using these methods are in general of importance to our understanding of the interstellar medium (in the former case) and our understanding of atmospheric or combustion reactions (in the latter case).

Homepage: http://www.meijer.group.shef.ac.uk/

Evelyn M. Goldfield is currently a program director in the Chemistry Division of the U.S. National Science Foundation. For many years she was an associate professor (research) at Wayne State University, and although she has retired, she maintains a research affiliation with the university. Her primary research interests are in quantum reaction dynamics, both methods development and applications to chemical systems, as well as in the design of large-scale parallel computing algorithms for quantum dynamics. Recently, she has become very interested in using the techniques of chemical dynamics, both quantum and classical, to study the effects of nanoscale confinement on chemical reactivity.

Homepage: http://chem.wayne.edu/~evi/

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Bertrand Retail graduated from the University of Bordeaux with a degree in Chemistry, and moved to the University of Bristol to undertake postgraduate research on the dynamics of chemical reactions involving organic molecules. He employed velocity map imaging methods to study adiabatic and non-adiabatic scattering dynamics, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2008. Bertrand subsequently accepted a research and development position with Hiden Analytical.

Andrew Orr-Ewing is a Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bristol. He obtained his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and spent two years at Stanford University as a postdoctoral researcher before moving to Bristol. His research interests include chemical reaction dynamics in the gas phase and in liquid solutions, photodissociation dynamics, and atmospheric and organic photochemistry.

Homepage: http://www.bris.ac.uk/chemistry/people/andrew-j-orr-ewing/index.html

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David W. Chandler received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1980, working with Professor George Ewing to study vibrational energy transfer in cryogenic liquids. After a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Professor R. N. Zare at Stanford he joined the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratory, where he has studied gas phase chemical dynamics at the Combustion Research Facility. In 1987 he built the first ion imaging apparatus for the visualization of chemical reactions and, in collaboration with Professor Paul L. Houston (Cornell), performed the first experiments using this technique on the photofragmentation of CH₃I. Ion imaging is a technique for the visualization and simultaneous determination of the velocity of quantum-state-selectively ionized molecules or atoms and has become widely used in many areas of research. In addition to his work in photochemistry he has participated in research in non-linear optics, crossed molecular beam scattering, photoelectron spectroscopy and optical microscopy.

Homepage: http://www.sandia.gov/kinetics/

Steven Stolte obtained his Ph.D. from the Catholic University in Nijmegen under the supervision of Jörg Reuss. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor R. B. Bernstein, he returned to Nijmegen in 1974, where he developed his interest in the orientation and alignment dependence in state selected reactions and, together with Aart Kleyn, initiated the field of surface scattering with oriented and state selected molecules. In 1989 he was appointed to the chair of Physical Chemistry at the Free University of Amsterdam, where he studied the steric and state-to-state dependence of inelastic scattering and molecular photodissociation, both on the nanosecond and femtosecond timescale (the latter in collaboration with Maurice Janssen). In 2008 he was appointed as a professor in Molecular Physics at the Atomic and Molecular Physics Institute of the Jilin University in Changchun (China), and a Senior Chair of the Triangle du Physique at the Laboratoire Francis Perrin in CEA/Saclay, and was distinguished as the first recipient of the 'R. B. Bernstein award' for stereodynamics.

Homepage: http://www.global-sci.org/jams/people/Stolte.html

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Piergiorgio Casavecchia is a Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Perugia. He worked with Nobel Laureate Yuan T. Lee in Berkeley where he learned the subtleties of crossed molecular beam scattering with universal mass spectrometric detection. He has studied extensively elastic, inelastic and reactive collision processes using this technique. Over the past 20 years his main research interests have focused on the reaction dynamics of both simple triatomic and complex polyatomic elementary reactions. Recently, Professor Casavecchia has implemented 'soft' electron-ionization for product detection in crossed molecular beam experiments, which has proven invaluable for the investigation of gas-phase multichannel reactions. In 2008 he was awarded the Polanyi Medal for his contributions to gas-phase reaction dynamics and kinetics.

Homepage: http://www.chm.unipg.it/chimgen/mb/exp3/casavecchia.html

Kopin Liu is a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in 1977 from Ohio State University, USA. His current research interests focus on product pair correlation in polyatomic reactions, mode and bond selective chemistry, and hydration dynamics.

Homepage: http://kliu.iams.sinica.edu.tw/

Xueming Yang received his B.S. degree in Physics from Zhejiang Normal University in 1982 and his M.Sc. degree in Chemical Physics from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS in 1985. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of California at Santa Barbara in 1991. After postdoctoral works in Princeton University and University of California at Berkeley, he became an associated research fellow in the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences in Taipei in 1995, and was promoted to a full research fellow with tenure in 2000. In 2001, he made a move to the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His main research interests are in the area of experimental chemical dynamics in the gas phase and at interfaces.

Homepage: http://www.chemdyn.dicp.ac.cn/index.html

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F. Fleming Crim received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, and after a brief period at the Western Electric Engineering Research Centre and a postdoctoral appointment at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, where he is now the John E. Willard and Hilldale Professor of Chemistry. The unifying theme of his research is understanding the role of vibrational energy in chemical reactions. A pioneering aspect of his work is controlling reactions using vibrational excitation to break bonds selectively in chemical reactions. Professor Crim and his coworkers use both high resolution lasers and ultrafast lasers to probe the fundamental details of chemical reactivity in gases and in liquids.

Homepage: http://www.chem.wisc.edu/~crim/index.html

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David H. Parker received his Ph.D. at the University of California Los Angeles under Professor M. A. El-Sayed and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University with Professor R. B. Bernstein. He joined the University of California Santa Cruz as Assistant Professor and started his present position at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands as Professor of Physics in 1991. His work combines laser ionization spectroscopy and two-dimensional imaging to study the dynamics of molecular photodissociation, energy transfer, and crossed-beam reaction in systems of relevance to atmospheric chemistry and astrochemistry.

Homepage: http://www.ru.nl/mollaserphys/group/board/prof-dr-david-parker/

Andre T. J. B. Eppink received his Ph.D. at the University of Nijmegen under Professor D. H. Parker and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Bielefeld with Professor P. Andresen. After working in industry (La Vision in Gottingen and NXP/Philips in Nijmegen) and teaching at high school level, he started his present position at the Department of Physics of the University of Nijmegen in 2009. Andre Eppink and David Parker co-discovered the velocity map imaging method, which is used in the study of molecular photodissociation as described in this chapter.

Homepage: http://www.ru.nl/mollaserphys/group/co-workers/andre_eppink/

Claire Vallance - see author biographies for Chapter 1.

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F. Javier Aoiz received his Ph.D. from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He spent a two year period at Columbia, working with the late Professor R. B. Bernstein, before joining the faculty of the Physical Chemistry Department at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he now has a chair in Physical Chemistry as full professor. He has been visiting professor in the universities of Oxford (UK) and UCLA (CA, USA). His research activities are related to experimental and theoretical chemical reaction dynamics and photodissociation processes. His present work is focused on fundamental aspects of dynamics and stereodynamics of chemical reactions and inelastic processes.

Homepage: http://www.ucm.es/info/dinalaser/index.html

Marcelo P. de Miranda was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he also received his first degree - in Chemistry, at Universidade Federal (UFRJ). He completed his Ph.D. at Université de Paris-Sud (France) under the supervision of J. Alberto Beswick. Before taking a lectureship at Leeds in 2001, he held positions at University College London (UK), Unicamp (Brazil) and New York University (USA). The first and third were postdoctoral positions (in the groups of David C. Clary and John Z. H. Zhang, respectively). As his students say, 'Marcelo loves the quantum'.

Homepage: http://www1.chem.leeds.ac.uk/People/MPM/

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George Darling undertook a Ph.D. at Imperial College. He then joined the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Surface Science at Liverpool shortly after it was formed, working mainly in computational gas-surface dynamics. He now has interests ranging widely in computational materials chemistry and surface science.

Homepage: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~darling/

Andrew Hodgson worked on laser spectroscopy and molecular photodissociation dynamics, before setting up a group to study gas-surface reaction dynamics at Liverpool. His current research interests centre around the structure and reactivity of ice surfaces, and particularly how water wets metal surfaces.

Homepage: http://www.liv.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/andrew-hodgson/

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Abigail D. G. Nunn carried out her Ph.D. at University College London, with Helen Fielding. She developed a pulse-shaper for creating arbitrarily shaped light pulses in the ultraviolet and employed femtosecond pump-probe methods to investigate the ultrafast dynamics of small organic molecules in the gas-phase.

Helen H. Fielding is a professor of Physical Chemistry at University College London. Her research is focused on the spectroscopy, femtosecond dynamics and coherent control of atoms, molecules and biomolecules in the gas-phase and on surfaces.

Homepage: http://www.chem.ucl.ac.uk/mdg/

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Gerrit C. Groenenboom obtained his Ph.D. at the Eindhoven University of Technology in 1991, after which he was a postdoctoral researcher with Professor W. H. Miller in Berkeley. In 1992 he obtained a position in the theoretical chemistry group of the University of Nijmegen, initially as a fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, later as assistant (1997) and associate Professor (2005). His first 'cold molecule paper' in 2000 concerned a He-O₂ potential energy surface. He also worked on quantum scattering calculations of cold collisions in magnetic fields and in 2006 he was a coauthor on a Science publication on near threshold Xe-OH collisions.

Homepage: http://www.theochem.ru.nl/~gerritg/

Liesbeth M. C. Janssen obtained her master's degree in chemistry summa cum laude from the Radboud University in Nijmegen. She has worked on photodissociation of small radicals with Professor D. H. Parker and Dr G. C. Groenenboom (Radboud University Nijmegen) and on quantum reaction dynamics in the group of Professor D. C. Clary (University of Oxford). Currently she is a Ph.D. student  in the theoretical chemistry group in Nijmegen, working with Dr G. C. Groenenboom and Professor A. van der Avoird on cold collisions of NH radicals.