Division of Molecular Physics

Division web page: http://www.ujk.edu.pl/ifiz/zfmo/

Topics

The group carries investigations of the following problems:

  1. Transport processes of substances across membranes (regular and anomalous diffusion, gravidiffusion, osmosis, graviosmosis, reversed osmosis, convection, filtration, studies of the near-membrane diffusion layers and generation of electric and gravielectric memebrane potentials).
  2. Problems of thermodynamic and mechanistic description of the substances transport cross the membrane.
  3. Microscopic structure of membranes (transport properties of polymeric membranes implanted with ions, determination of linear size of pores and molecules of solved substances).
  4. Physical foundations of induced long-distance water translocation in plants. Water circulation in plants.
  5. Interaction of electrons with positively charged molecular ions.
    The research is related to the study of dissociation of molecular ions following their interactions with free electrons. These processes occur in the low temperature plasma, both under natural and man-made conditions e.g. interstellar clouds, planetary ionospheres, combastion and even edge regions of tokamaks. One of the most dominant way of destroying molecular ions in cold plasma is dissociative recombination in which a molecular ion captures an electron and stabilizes by dissociating into neutral fragments. These reactions make possible a synthesis of more and more complex molecules in the media where chemical reactions involving neutral species are prohibited by high activation barriers. The mentioned reactions are investigated with a merged-beams setup at a heavy storage ring CRYRING (http://www.msi.se), Stockholm. The experiment include measurements of absolute cross sections for dissociative recombination and ion pair formation and branching ratios in dissociative recombination of polyatomic molecular ions. This research is developed in collaboration with division of molecular physics at Stockholm University and supported by the European Community Research Training Networks Programme under contract HPRN-CT-2000-0142 ( http://www.mol.physto.se/etr/ ).

Setup for interferometry measurements