This week the DESIREE infrastructure hosted users from the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, Daniel Strasser and Alon Bogot. The research project aims to understand the mystery of water: what may happen when H3O+ meets OH- in gas phase, proton transfer or electron transfer? The project is in collaboration with local researchers Mathias Poline and Richard Thomas.

What is your research in general?

Mutual neutralization of molecular anions and cations.

How will your experiments at DESIREE further your research?

We will study the mutual neutralization of H3O+ + OH-

Are there any unique capabilities of DESIREE that you are exploiting?

The capability to merge trapped cation and anion beams and record the neutral products of mutual neutralization is unique to the DESIREE setup.

The trapping is essential to study of molecular species, in which internal excitation during the ionization process can be expected to affect the measured mutual neutralization mechanism.

How do you find it to work at DESIREE infrastructure?

So far so good.