INTRODUCTION
OUR RESEARCH METHODS
Mass Spectrometry
Optical Spectroscopy of Gaseous Ions
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an gas-phase analytical method that ionize chemical species and separate those ions by their mass-to-charge ratio (m/z). MS enables to determine the masses of chemical species, and to isolate the specific molecule or molecular complex by mass in the gas phase. Therefore, MS is an essential tool to investigate the atomic and molecular clusters.
Ion Mobility Spectrometry
In ion mobility spectrometry (IMS), molecular ions drift through a buffer gas under the influence of a weak electric field and are separated by their geometrical sizes and charge states, which enables to separate isomers and conformers. In addition, collision cross section (CCS) of a molecular ion can be determined, which is further compared to the structures from molecular modelling.
Ion spectroscopy can provide direct information about the underlying structure of the ion. For example, vibrational spectroscopy is highly sensitive to the functional groups and their interactions, and therefore is very useful to probe the roles of functional groups, internal interactions, and structural evolution during the cluster formation and growth.
Theoretical Approaches
To obtain atomic- and molecular-level structural information, we are also using theoretical approaches which include molecular modeling, molecular dynamics simulation (MD), and ab initio quantum chemical calculation.
RESEARCH TOPICS
With these experimental and theoretical methods on hands, we are interested in the following research themes:
- Tracking structural changes of biomolecular complexes (e.g., peptides, nucleotides, proteins, etc.) during their self-assembly processes.
- Studying the formation process of organic/inorganic supramolecular assemblies (e.g., MOF)
- Investigating the nucleation process of various metal and/or semiconductor nanoparticles
- Studying the structures and interactions of nucleation intermediates - various organic and inorganic pollutant aggregates in the air
- Building a new IMS-MS instrument for nanoparticle analysis
- Size-specific separation and isolation of nanoparticle ions in the gas phase using IMS-MS
- Soft-landing of the size-selected nanoparticle ions on various substrates
Last updated: 12.06.2019.