Dr. Kevin Carnes
K-State Department of Physics
From Ion Beams to Laser Beams: 28 Years of AMO Physics at the J. R. Macdonald Lab
102 Cardwell Hall
February 11, 2013
4:30 p.m.
I will give a brief overview of the
development of the J. R. Macdonald Laboratory’s experimental capabilities since
I arrived at K-State in 1984.
Over the years, we expanded our accelerator
facilities to cement our role as one of the premier AMO collisions facilities in
the country.
In the first years of the new millennium, we made the
switch from accelerators to ultrafast lasers with the development of the Kansas
Light Source.
We have now established ourselves as a leading ultrafast
lab, as evidenced by the recent installation of the PULSAR laser.
Despite the change in emphasis, our
expertise in momentum imaging has been a constant throughout.
Foundational to that expertise has been our use of
delay-line detectors and our advanced event-mode multi-parameter data
acquisition and analysis system.
I will cover this in some depth.
The bulk of the
talk will focus on our research into the interaction of beams of molecular ions,
in particular the H3+/D3+
ion, with ultrafast lasers.
H3+
is the simplest polyatomic molecule and nicely illustrates both the advantages
of using a molecular ion beam as a target for the laser and the information we
can gain using our coincidence 3D momentum imaging technique. I will summarize
our results, reported in several publications, such as the identification of
dissociation pathways, orientation preferences for dissociation and ionization,
and kinetic energy released in the various dissociation/ionization processes.
Refreshments in CW 119 at 4:15 p.m.