Spatially separated polar samples of the cis and trans conformers of 3-fluorophenol

Abstract

We demonstrate the spatial separation of the cis-and trans-conformers of 3-fluorophenol in the gas phase based on their distinct electric dipole moments. For both conformers we create very polar samples of their lowest-energy rotational quantum states. A >95 % pure beam of trans-3-fluorophenol and a >90 % pure beam of the lowest-energy rotational states of the less polar cis-3-fluorophenol were obtained for helium and neon supersonic expansions, respectively. This is the first demonstration of the spatial separation of the lowest-energy rotational states of the least polar conformer, which is necessary for strong alignment and orientation of all individual conformers.

Improved spatial separation of neutral molecules

“…14,16 However, the different rotational states of each isotopologue are not separable by the current deflector and molecular beam diameter and divergence. Thus a nuclear-spin purification, as previously demonstrated for water, 60 is not possible with the current setup.…”

“…10 Modern experiments typically employed geometries approximating two-wire fields. 6,7 The technique allowed for a wide range of applications, such as the separation of molecules in individual rotational states, [11][12][13] of conformers, [14][15][16] and of specific molecular clusters. 17 Additionally, the deflector enables the separation of polar molecules from the seed gas, which is relevant, for instance, for gas-phase diffraction experiments.…”

Spatial separation of 2-propanol monomer and its ionization-fragmentation pathways

“…Such spatial separation of molecular conformers was previously achieved using inhomogeneous electric fields [29,30]. Different species of complex molecules can be spatially separated within a cold molecular beam by the electrostatic deflector [29], which was demonstrated in a number of pioneering experiments on the separation of individual quantum states [31][32][33], structural isomers [34,35], or specific cluster sizes [36][37][38][39][40]. Here, the 2-propanol monomer is spatially separated from the original molecular beam using the deflector and the purified samples are exploited in femtosecond-laser ionization studies.…”

Pure Molecular Beam of Water Dimer

“…The electrostatic deflector is an established method to spatially separate the molecules of interest from the carrier gas and to separate different species within a cold molecular beam [26]. This includes the separation of molecular conformers [27][28][29][30], individual quantum states of small molecules [31,32], as well as specific molecular clusters [24,33,34]. The deflector was previously utilized in investigations of water, e. g., to determine the rotational temperatures of "warm" molecular beams of water [35], to separate its para and ortho species [32], and to measure the dipole moment of small water-clusters [36].…”