Group news
In Memoriam - Harold Linnartz
January 1, 2024 - The extremely sad news reached us that professor Harold Linnartz passed away unexpectedly on 12/31/2023. Harold has served as my scientific mentor throughout my career, starting in 2003 when I was a bachelor student in applied physics, throughout my masters degree in physical chemistry, and towards my PhD in laboratory astrochemistry. He has been instrumental in my succes in every step of my scientific career, all the way to my current professorship at CU Boulder.
Harold was a warm, calm and sincere person with a great sense of humor and a fantastic scientist who took the field of laboratory astrochemistry and spectroscopy to the next level. Thank you for your endless support and for always believing in my capabilities. You will be missed tremendously.
Poster presentation at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco
December 20, 2023 - I presented a poster on our recently granted Precursor Science Investigation for Europa Clipper program at the AGU meeting in San Francisco. This was my first time at the AGU with lots of great chemistry with applications to planetary sciences and the latest and greatest on fuuture space missions. More AGUs to come!
First publication by Jerry Kamer
Oct 20, 2023 - Jerry Kamer's first publication on "Threshold photoelectron spectroscopy and dissociative photoionization of benzonitrile" has been published in Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics. Congratulations on this milestone!
The combined experimental and computational study describes the ionization and dissociative ionization behavior of the interstellar relevant molecule benzonitrile. Insights in the dissociation mechanims are obtained at a molecular level of detail and dissociation energies are retrieved from a statistical model of the experimental data.
The full version is available online by clicking here.
Rory passed his comprehensive exam!
Oct 16, 2023 - Congratulations! You are now officially ready to get your fantastic research going.
Swiss Light Source beamrun
July 1, 2023 - From June 13 until June 21, we conducted yet another fantastic measurement campaign at the Swiss Light Source. We brought home fantastic data and are excited to start analyzing it and writing it up. A big thank you goes out to Rory McClish and Domenik Schleier (Uni Paderborn) who joined us for the run. We are greatful for the support by the superb beamline scientists Andras Bodi and Patrick Hemberger.
CU Boulder UROP Mentor Award for Jordy Bouwman
April 28, 2023 - I am very please to have received a CU Boulder UROP Mentor Award for my guidance of Jackson Cahn in the summer of 2022. It was a great joy and pleasure to work with Jackson on the computational study of the formation of nitrogen-bearing hydrocarbons in space. I am delighted to see that my mentorship has had a positive impact. Thanks for the nomination and for the fantastic work we did last year, Jackson!
Caitlyn Staudenmier obtained a UROP fellowship
April 4, 2023 - We are delighted to have Caitlyn Staudenmier join our group this summer as a UROP summer student. Caitlyn will be studying the formation of cyclic N-bearing hydrocarbons by performing quantum chemical calculations on CU Boulder's research computing facility. Congratulations Caitlyn!
Paper in Nature Astronomy
February 7, 2023 - We are very excited to have our work publlished in Nature Astronomy! In this study we show that ortho-benzyne, a cyclic molecule with biradical character that has recently been detected in the cold molecular cloud TMC-1, plays a critical role in the bottom-up formation of complex hydrocarbons. I am grateful to our collaborators in the Netherlands, Switzerland and USA and Germany!
Figure credits: Henry Cardwell
Beamrun at the Swiss Light Source in Villigen Switserland
In October and November of 2022, Jerry Kamer and Dr. Domenik Schleier performed a fantastic run on the iPEPICO system at the vacuum ultraviolet beamline of the Swiss Light Source in Villigen and collected yet another set of valuable data using the pyrolysis microreactor.
Presentation at elementary school "de Startbaan" in Sassenheim, the Netherlands
On May 18 2022, I gave a presentation to wonderful curious 8 year old children at "de Startbaan" in preparation for their visit to the European Space Agency museum Space Expo. The kids enjoyed learning about the formation of our solar system, the planets and moons and the stars that we see on the night sky. It was fantastic to hear the wonderful questions they asked: Do aliens exist? Where does all the space junk go? Is it not a shame that you build these wonderful instruments and then you send them away and never get them back? Thanks for an amazing experience and do not lose the curiosity!
Run at the Free Electron Laser for Infrared Experiments
In May 2022, Domenik and Jerry conducted a fantastic measurement campaign at the Free Electron Laser FELIX at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. With the fantastic help from the local beamline scientists they managed to record beautiful IR spectra of a set of interstellar relevant polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon species.
