Ph.D., 1978, Cornell I. Chemistry in cold molecular beams
Molecular beam methods have had an enormous range of application
in chemical physics, chemistry, and analytical chemistry. The
powerful and increasingly common use of electrospray and MALDI
mass spectrometry were developed from basic molecular beam work.
A. novel organosilicon species One especially fruitful area of
current molecular beam based research, and in our work, involves
the production, stabilization and study of reactive species
(e.g. radical fragments). Small molecule Si analogs of carbon
compounds such as acetone and triply bonded Si species are
highly reactive; one cannot simply take some out of a bottle for
study. However, using the properties of supersonic gas
expansions that underlie the production of cold molecular beams,
one can potentially produce and stabilize the target species
from precursors at the start of the gas expansions. Generally a
laser pulse is used to initiate photochemistry in a precursor.
One particularly promising ap