Molecular beams research in the chemistry department of the Complutense university: progress over a decade

This paper reports on the progress made over nearly a decade (1980-1990) by the Molecular Beam Group in the Complutense University of Madrid. After the author's stay in the United States as Prof. R.B Bernstein's post doc everything here had to be done from scratch. Designing the apparatus; importing all the equipment; overcoming huge bureaucracy: buying screws, welding, plumbing, etc. Essentially the following experimental techniques were set up: crossed-beam techniques to measure total and differential reaction cross-section for ground and/or excited species. Reaction Energy threshold and excitation functions for elementary chemical reactions. Molecular Beam chemiluminescence either in crossed-beam and beam-gas conditions. Laser-induced fluorescence and laser-induced charge transfer processes in beams and crossed-beam conditions, respectively. The chemiionization technique in crossed-beams was also set up. Our group pioneered: (a) the measurement of high resolution threshold energies and total reaction cross-section (also in absolute units) for many reactions; (b) the production of highly intense pulsed beams of electronically excited atoms; (c) the measurement under high resolution of the crossed-beam dynamics of excited species; (d) the measurement of the role of alkyl groups in the dynamics (stereodynamics) of chemical reactions; (e) the measurement of the spin-orbit effects in laser-induced charge transfer processes; (f) the developing of a novel technique, using the time-of-flight method under crossed-beam conditions, that is able to measure existing quantum effects in the total reaction cross-section; (g) the measurement of dissociation energies of radicals with less than 1% of experimental error. (Author) 76 refs. 32 fig