Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are regarded as key intermediates in the molecular growth process that forms soot from incomplete fossil fuel combustion. Although heavily researched, the reaction mechanisms for PAH formation have only been investigated through bulk experiments; therefore, current models remain conjectural. We report the first observation of a directed synthesis of a PAH...

The Stark deceleration method exploits the concepts of charged particle accelerator physics to produce molecular beams with a tunable velocity. These tamed molecular beams offer interesting perspectives for precise crossed beam scattering studies as a function of the collision energy. The method has advanced sufficiently to compete with state-of-the-art beam methods that are used for scattering...

Crossed molecular beam scattering experiments in which the energy of the collision is varied can reveal valuable insight into the collision dynamics. The energy resolution that can be obtained depends mainly on the velocity and angular spreads of the molecular beams; often, these are too broad to resolve narrow features in the cross sections like scattering resonances. The collision energy reso...

The local collision probability approximation (LCPA) method is introduced to compute molecular momentum transfer cross sections for comparison to ion mobility experiments. The LCPA replaces the (non-local) scattering trajectory used in the trajectory method to describe the collision process by a (local) collision probability function. This momentum transfer probability is computed using the exa...

The reaction between ground state carbon atoms, C(3P(j)), and phosphine, PH3(X(1)A1), was investigated at two collision energies of 21.1 and 42.5 kJ mol(-1) using the crossed molecular beam technique. The chemical dynamics extracted from the time-of-flight spectra and laboratory angular distributions combined with ab initio calculations propose that the reaction proceeds on the triplet surface ...