The authors present results from a grant funded under the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences. A collaboration between Prof. Alec Wodtke of the Department of Chemistry at UCSB and Daniel J. Auerbach of IBM Almaden Research Labs has allowed new experiments on the dynamics of surface chemical reactivity to be successfully executed. High quality data has been generated which provides an excellent test of theoretical models of surface reactivity, a topic of importance to catalysis. The authors have obtained the first experimental measurements on the influence of reactant velocity on the steric effect in a chemical reaction: the dissociative adsorption of hydrogen on copper. They have also designed and built a molecular beam scattering apparatus for the study of highly vibrationally excited molecules and their interactions with clean and oxidized metal surfaces. With this apparatus they have observed the vibrational energy exchange of highly vibrationally excited NO with an oxidized copper surface. Multi-quantum vibrational relaxation was found ([Delta]v = 1-5). Such remarkably strong and efficient vibrational energy transfer represents a qualitatively new phenomenon and is representative of the exciting new behavior that they had hoped might be observable in this project. Evidence of chemical reactivity of vibrationally excited NO on a clean copper surface was also found.

The interaction of gas-phase molecules with solid surfaces is of importance to heterogeneous catalysis, corrosion, air filtration, pollution control, and chemical deactivation. Our research group has recently obtained some of the first direct measurements of the probability for vibrational deactivation during gas-solid collisions. A pulsed infrared laser is used to excite CO of CO2 vibrationally under conditions where the predominant cause of deactivation is due to the gas-surface collision. The probability of relaxation is then monitored by observing the time-dependent decay of infrared fluorescence from the excited molecules. Results for CO2 (001) show that the deactivation probability is 0.22 for collisions with a stainless steel surface, 0.16 for silver, and 0.20 for nickel.

Highly vibrationally excited molecules often control the course of chemical reactions in the atmosphere, combustion, plasmas, and many other environments. The research described in this Progress Report uses laser excitation and interrogation techniques to study and control the dynamics of highly vibrationally excited molecules. In particular, they show that it is possible to unravel the details and influence the course of photodissociation and bimolecular reaction. The experiments use laser excitation of overtone vibrations to prepare highly vibrationally excited molecules, frequently with single quantum state resolution, and laser spectroscopy to monitor the subsequent behavior of the excited molecule. We have studied the vibrationally mediated photodissociation and the bond- and state-selected bimolecular reaction of highly vibrationally excited molecules. In the first process, one photon creates a highly excited molecule, a second photon from another laser dissociates it, and light from a third laser detects the population of individual product quantum states. This approach allows us to explore otherwise inaccessible regions of the ground and excited state potential energy surface and, by exciting to the proper regions of the surface, to control the breaking of a selected chemical bond. In the second process, the highly vibrationally excited molecule reacts with an atom formed either in a microwave discharge or by photolysis and another laser interrogates the products. We have used this approach to demonstrate mode- and bond-selected bimolecular reactions in which the initial excitation controls the subsequent chemistry. 30 refs., 8 figs.

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