Event Details

Prof Clare Vallance from the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, will be presenting a seminar on "Imaging the Mechanisms of Chemical Reactions"

Thescattering (or velocity) distributions of products formed in a gas-phasechemical reaction reveal many of the intricate details of the reactionmechanism, often at the quantum-state-resolved level. Over the pasttwenty years or so, velocity-map imaging has enabled the complete scatteringdistribution of a chosen reaction product to be imaged directly in a singlemeasurement. More recently, the development of universal ionization methodsand ultrafast time-of-flight imaging sensors has ushered in the era ofmulti-mass velocity-map imaging, in which multiple reaction products can beimaged in a single experiment. As well as facilitating the study ofmuch larger molecules, of interest to a wider audience of chemists, amulti-mass imaging data set also reveals correlations between the finalvelocities of different reaction products, providing even more detailedinformation on reaction mechanisms. In my talk I will explore ways inwhich these new techniques can be used to obtain information on evolvingmolecular structures in real time and to disentangle multiple competingmulti-step reaction pathways