Balram Kaderiya presents at K-State Graduate Research, Arts, and Discovery (GRAD) Forum

Balram Kaderiya, graduate research assistant in the JRM Lab, will present his research at the 2019 K-State Grad Forum on Wednesday, March 27, at 10:15 am ini 2142 Regnier Hall. Balram will present "Molecular Movies for Imaging the Transient Molecular Geometries of Light-Induced Polyatomic Systems".

Credits for this research also go to Kanaka Raju P., W.L. Pearson, Xiang Li, Travis Severt, Farzaeh Ziaee, Kurtis Borne, Yubaraj Malakar, I. Ben Itzhak, Daniel Rolles, and Artem Rudenko.

The backgground and purpose of this research is as follows: Imaging of transient geometries is essential for the study of the photoinduced chemical processes (bond formation and breaking, control of concerted elimination pathways) and hence, important for the understanding of the complicated dynamics of polyatomic system. Here, we use halomethanes (CH2I2, CH2ICl) as the polyatomic molecular target for the study of imaging of the geometries of the intermediate states in different fragmentation channels.

Methods include: The experimental setup is based on the cold target recoil ion momentum spectroscopy combined with pump-probe technique for ultrafast measurements. The analysis is based on measurement of fragments from the three-body breakup channel induced by the pump & probe (800 nm, 25 fs, 2-5 1014 w/cm2 ) pulses.

Results/Finding are: The time-resolved information on the kinetic energies (KE) and emission angles (“θ”) measurement of the ionic fragments are used to take the snapshots of the fragments belonging to the different dissociation pathways. CONCLUSION: Doing so, we are able to separate different dissociation pathways including the one involving halogen molecule formation in an intuitive fashion, which is a big challenge for polyatomic molecular systems. Similar 3-body analysis method can be applied for the understanding of the complicated dissociation pathways of other polyatomic molecules.