This website describes my research experience in the Physics REU at Kansas State University in the summer of 2011. During this time, I conducted research in atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) physics in the James R. Macdonald Laboratory.

  My project is to study the dissociation of O₂⁺ in a strong field produced by ultrashort intense laser pulses. I am interested in the a ⁴Π_u → f ⁴Π_g transition, which represents the excitation and dissociation of the O₂⁺ molecule into O⁺ + O due to the absorption of one photon. Photons with energies of 3.2 eV and 4.8 eV generated by the second (390 nm) and third (263 nm) harmonics of a 790 nm laser pulse are used in this study. The harmonics are generated through passing the 790 nm laser pulse, created by a Ti:sapphire laser, through a series of optical crystals, waveplates and filters. My goal is to study the Cooper minima in O₂⁺ dissociation, which describes local minima in the transitional probabilities shown in figure 1. I compared the locations of the Cooper minima found in my theoretical calculations with our experimental kinetic energy release (KER) spectra recorded this summer.

Figure 1: This graph represents the transition probabilities for different vibrational states of the O₂⁺ molecule. The arrows represent Cooper minima within the spectra.

  I would like to say thank you to KSU Physics REU Program, Larry Weaver and Kristan Corwin for giving me the opportunity to participate in this program. I would also like to thank my mentor Itzik Ben-Itzhak, and grad students Mohammad Zohrabi, Utuq Ablikim, Nora G. Johnson and Ben Berry for helping guide me in my research as well as helping me understand any questions I came across.