On the nature of hydrogen bonding in the HS dimer.

Hydrogen bonding is a central concept in chemistry and biochemistry, and so it continues to attract intense study. Here, we examine hydrogen bonding in the HS dimer, in comparison with the well-studied water dimer, in unprecedented detail. We record a mass-selected IR spectrum of the HS dimer in superfluid helium nanodroplets.

Vibrational energy transfer in ammonia-helium collisions.

While the rotational energy transfer of ammonia by rare gas atoms and hydrogen molecules has been the focus of many studies, little is known about its vibrational relaxation, even though transitions involving the umbrella bending mode have been observed in many astrophysical environments. Here we explore the vibrational relaxation of the umbrella mode of ammonia induced by collisions with helium atoms by means of the close-coupling method on an potential energy surface. We compute cross sections up to kinetic energies of 1500 cm and rate coefficients up to a temperature of 300 K for vibrational, rotational, and inversion transitions involving the lowest two vibrational states.

State-to-state rovibrational transition rates for CO2 in the bend mode in collisions with He atoms.

Modeling environments that are not in local thermal equilibrium, such as protoplanetary disks or planetary atmospheres, with molecular spectroscopic data from space telescopes requires knowledge of the rate coefficients of rovibrationally inelastic molecular collisions. Here, we present such rate coefficients in a temperature range from 10 to 500 K for collisions of CO2 with He atoms in which CO2 is (de)excited in the bend mode. They are obtained from numerically exact coupled-channel (CC) calculations as well as from calculations with the less demanding coupled-states approximation (CSA) and the vibrational close-coupling rotational infinite-order sudden (VCC-IOS) method.

Imaging rotational energy transfer: comparative stereodynamics in CO + N and CO + CO inelastic scattering.

State-to-state rotational energy transfer in collisions of ground ro-vibrational state CO molecules with N molecules has been studied using the crossed molecular beam method under kinematically equivalent conditions used for CO + CO rotationally inelastic scattering described in a previously published report (Sun , , 2020, , 307-309). The collisionally excited CO molecule products are detected by the same (1 + 1' + 1'') VUV (Vacuum Ultra-Violet) resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization scheme coupled with velocity map ion imaging. We present differential cross sections and scattering angle resolved rotational angular momentum alignment moments extracted from experimentally measured CO + N scattering images and compare them with theoretical predictions from quasi-classical trajectories (QCT) on a newly calculated CO-N potential energy surface (PES).

Tomography of Feshbach resonance states.

Feshbach resonances are fundamental to interparticle interactions and become particularly important in cold collisions with atoms, ions, and molecules. In this work, we present the detection of Feshbach resonances in a benchmark system for strongly interacting and highly anisotropic collisions: molecular hydrogen ions colliding with noble gas atoms. The collisions are launched by cold Penning ionization, which exclusively populates Feshbach resonances that span both short- and long-range parts of the interaction potential.