Molecules in motion

Abstract

The group for molecular kinetics and spectroscopy at ETH Zürich investigates the fundamental physical-chemical primary processes of chemical reactions. We have developed a conceptually new approach to derive these primary processes of intramolecular kinetics on time scales leading into the femtosecond and subfemtosecond domain on the basis of infrared spectroscopy with high frequency resolution but without short-time resolution. Selected applications include intramolecular wavepacket dynamics of chemical functional groups of isolated, individual molecules and IR-laser chemistry of molecules under infrared multiphoton excitation, hydrogen bond tunneling dynamics in hydrogen fluoride clusters (HF)2 and the tunneling stereomutation of prototypical chiral molecules. One of the greatest current challenges is the elucidation of the influence of the parity violating weak interaction mediated by the Z-boson of high energy physics on the dynamics of chiral molecules.