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The University of Southampton
Chemistry

Magnetic Molecular Beams - a non-conventional approach for hyper sensitive NMR Seminar

Time:
15:00
Date:
4 October 2016
Venue:
Building 27, Room 1137, Chemistry, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ To get to 27/1137, you have to enter B27 by the north-east entrance. There is no access from inside B27.

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Prof Malcolm Levitt at M.H.Levitt@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Gil Alexandrowicz presents a magnetic resonance seminar. All welcome to attend.

Magnetic molecular beam experiments are in many ways the ancestors of the nuclear magnetic resonance technique, and are conceived by many people in the NMR community as awfully complicated experiments which were performed in the far past, before “normal” NMR was invented. In our group we develop and apply new magnetic molecular beam methods to measure fundamental, atomic-scale properties of materials which can not be studied using existing experimental methods.

In this talk I will present two examples which combine molecular beams and magnetic resonance experiments. One is the development of a hyper sensitive NMR spectrometer, an instrument which should (hopefully) be capable of measuring a single layer of molecules adsorbed on a surface. This spectrometer uses a molecular beam of pure ortho-water which we create using a Stern-Gerlach type magnetic filtering setup[1,2]. 

A second experiment I will briefly describe is a molecular interferometer setup which combines a gas phase NMR experiment with molecular scattering. The signal measured in this experiment is the quantum interference of the zeeman and rotational states of molecules within a magnetic field, both before, and after scattering from a solid sample. The resulting measurement contains information about how the rotation of a molecule affects the way it scatters from a surface. I will present some very recent data we measured of hydrogen molecules scattering from a copper surface. 

[1] Science, 331, 319 (2011)

[2] Physical Review A, 86, 062710 (2012)

 

Speaker information

Gil Alexandrowicz, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Gil Alexandrowicz's reserach interests include structure and ultra fast dynamics on surfaces, helium atom scattering, nano-scale friction on surfaces & magnetically manipulated atomic and molecular beams.

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