- Students & Postdocs - Education & Outreach - About JILA Former
research associate Antonio Picón, research associate Agnieszka
Jaron-Becker, and Fellow Andreas Becker have discovered a way to
make the hydrogen molecular ion (H2+) fall apart into its
constituent atoms without exciting or ionizing the electron.
This startling finding was a big surprise for the researchers,
who recently figured out how to do something that conventional
wisdom said was difficult, if not downright impossible. For
starters, molecules usually don’t split up into atoms unless at
least one electron is excited or ionized. Rather, they
dissociate into charged ions, with one negatively charged ion
containing one or more extra electrons and another positively
charged ion missing the same number of electrons. Researchers
thought that the only two ways to break apart a molecule into
neutral atoms would be (1) to hit it with a rapid sequence of
laser pulses over a wide range of different frequencies (i.e.,
energies) or (2) to change the fre