Speaker
Description
In last decades room-temperature ion storage rings have proven to be unique tools for investigating properties and reaction dynamics of molecular ions, in particular the low-energy electron-ion collisions in merged beams. This is mainly due to 1) the long storage of the ions allowing relaxation of the internal ion states and 2) the ion beam target preparation for experiments at high collision-energy resolution by, e.g., electron cooling. The recently built Cryogenic Storage Ring (CSR) [1] in Heidelberg, Germany, with its < 6 K vacuum wall temperature brings these advantages to a new level: the low radiation field allows the molecules to relax down to their ro-vibrational ground-state. Studying collisions of cold molecular ions with electrons, photons, and atoms give access to unprecedented details on the respective reaction dynamics. Also, the CSR environment mimics well the conditions in the cold interstellar medium, which makes CSR an outstanding experimental set-up for laboratory astrochemistry.
In the talk the measurements from the first five years of CSR operation will be reviewed, with an emphasis on the recent rotational-state resolved dissociative recombination studies [2].
[1] R. von Hahn et al. Rev. Sci. Instr. 87 063115 (2016)
[2] O. Novotny et al., Science 365, 676 (2019)
