IVS - Spotlight Articles

A work by Prof. Igor Rahinov (former President of IVS), and his collaborators from Germany, the US, India, and Greece, was recently published in Science

In this work, the researchers demonstrated that vibrationally excited molecules can survive much longer than expected on metal surfaces – suggesting that vibrational excitation might promote or modify heterogeneously catalyzed Langmuir-Hinshelwood chemistry on metals. In their experiments, IR laser excitation was used to prepare short pulses of vibrationally excited CO(v=2) molecules that impinged and scattered from a clean Au(111) surface. By quantum-state-resolved scattering studied in temporally and spatially resolved fashion this work has demonstrated that vibrationally excited molecules, prepared in the v=2 state retain significant vibrational excitation, even after residing ~100 ps on Au(111). Furthermore, they have shown that the vibrational relaxation time can serve as an internal clock to follow the microscopic pathways of adsorption and equilibration on the surface. Based on molecular beam experiments and theoretical modeling the researchers have revealed the intricate interplay between physisorption and chemisorption states for the prototypical CO/Au(111) system, relevant to many other heterogeneous systems.

Science Magazine link for the full paper