Book Description

The tunable vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) laser generated through the two-photon resonance-enhanced four-wave mixing scheme is combined with the newly developed time-slice velocity map imaging photoion method to study the photodissociation of small molecules in the VUV region, and with the velocity map imaging photoelectron method to study the photoionization of free radicals. The photodissociation dynamics of NO in the energy region around 13.5 eV has been investigated. Branching ratios of the three lowest dissociation channels of 12C16O that produce C(3P) + O(3P), C(1D) + O(3P) and C(3P) + O(1D) are measured for the first time in the VUV region from 102,500 cm−1 to 110,500 cm−1, valuable information of the dissociation dynamics for this prototype system has been deduced. We demonstrated an experiment that has two independently tunable VUV lasers and a time-slice velocity map imaging setup, this provides us a global way to perform systematic state-selected photodissociation of small molecules via state-selected detection of the atomic products in the VUV region. The velocity map imaging photoelectron method was successfully used to obtain the photoelectron spectrum of the propargyl radical (C3H3) via a single VUV photoionization process. The propargyl radical is generated by the 193 nm laser photodissociation of the precursor C3H3Cl. This is the first time that the velocity map imaging photoelectron method is used to get the photoelectron spectra of free radicals, indicating that it is a powerful technique for studying the photoionization of free radicals which are always hard to be produced with high enough number densities for spectroscopic studies.