 Well, it's an honor for me to be the guest introducer here, and it's my special honor to introduce Luda Toscano. She's working at the university in Basel, where she has just started her own independent group. So she's really at the early stage of her career. Before that, she actually did, she's from Italy, but she spent most of her time being educated abroad. So she did her master's degree at the University in the College of London, working on astrochemistry. And from then on, she stayed in England, and she moved to Oxford University at the Department of Chemistry, where she worked with semen distillation of molecules and control molecules in the group of Tim Softley and Brianna Hazelwood. So that was still sort of in the chemistry side of the world. And from that, she switched really to physics, to one of the most famous persons in cold atoms and quantum gases in Boulder, where she worked with carbon-60. I am actually not quite sure what you did with carbon-60. Me neither. That's all right. We're still trying to figure it out. And then after that, she went to Basel in Switzerland, where she was the postdoc with Stephen Willis. That's well known, probably to many of you, and to Mikael Dobson, because he was an iron crystals. And just recently, she got one of these procedures, ambitione fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation, which allows us to start her own career. And without further interruption, I'll hand it over to you, so please. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for coming to the seminar. Yes, I'm Yuta Toscano, as Henrik said, from the University of Basel. I moved there about a year and a few months ago to work with the lab with Stephen Village. And in general, what we're trying to do is, as the title says, maneuver chemical reactions, one degree of freedom at a time. So stir them in one direction or the other or try to control them in several different ways, as I'll try to convince you throughout the talk. So usually, chemical reactions happen between molecules that are present in a variety of quantum states and they have different velocities. And we measure some average behavior. It's a bit of a mess. It's a little bit like listening to an orchestra playing a symphony with all the instruments playing their individual tunes simultaneously. So it's beautiful, but at the same time, if you want to gain deeper understanding of the melody and you want to fine-tune the performance and or the outcome of the reaction, for example, you would like to be able to selectively listen to the violin, for example, and then selectively listen to the cello and then try to kind of understand how that can be changed to change the overall symphony. And in the chemical world, that is kind of equal to taking a molecule in a specific quantum state and then adding, say, some rotation to it and seeing how that changes the reactivity. And to do this, we don't actually have a conductor's wand, unfortunately. Instead, we have electromagnetic fields. So we apply fields depending on the specific properties of the atoms and molecules that we're trying to control. We can apply a variety of different fields. So I've broadly categorized them as electric fields. Here, magnetic fields and laser light. And I'm giving you a very short list of some of the techniques that are used in the fields to control the different degrees of freedom, depending on the properties of, say, if we want to control ions or radicals or polar molecules or apolar molecules or whatever it is, they're all atoms. And specifically throughout this talk, I'll be referring to electrostatic deflections. So applying an electric field to control molecules that have a dipole moment. And so the dipole moment interacts with the field and we can kind of steer them that way. Iron trapping for ionic species, as a lot of you are familiar with. And also laser cooling for the very, very good ionic species that are well-behaved enough to be able to laser cool this. Some of you here also know very well. But first, let me try to kind of define the problem from the physics perspective, which would be, ideally, theoretically, what we'd like to do is to have the simplest possible chemical reaction. Because as you will all know probably, controlling atoms and molecules is hard enough already. So when you're trying to combine them, you would like to have very, very controlled of the species that you're trying to combine in the first place. But there is a lot of different things to control and which is what part of the title of the talk comes from. So there's a lot of different degrees of freedom that we would like to have very well-defined. And so some of them are internal degrees of freedom, so electronic vibration and rotations of the molecules. But also external degrees of freedom, so such as the velocity. So if you have a velocity spread of the different species or a collision energy, as well as, for example, the spatial orientation of the molecule with respect to the laboratory, but also, as we'll see more in the talk, the structural orientation of the atoms within the molecule. So how the different atoms point within the molecule. And so ideally what we'd like to do is to simplify the theoretical problem by having everything very well-defined to begin with, which ends up being rather more complicated experimentally, as we'll see. So another very useful distinction, I think, is to then define what we mean by how we want these degrees of freedom to be, right? So we can have a distribution of states that can either be thermal, like I'm representing here with this kind of line to imply that there is some population under several of these states. And so that usually arises from experiment that use collisional cooling in some sense, or from some preparation methods that use collisional cooling. So for example, when we make a molecular beam, we have an expansion from a high pressure chamber into a vacuum through a nozzle. And that causes adiabatic cooling. So all of the internal, well, most of the internal energy gets converted into kinetic energy in the lab frame of reference. So we end up with a supersonic very fast beam that's still, if you sat on the beam, it would be very translationally cold in the sense that the velocity spread of the atoms and molecules only a Kelvin or so. But at the same time, it's very fast. And that lets us cool down, for example, to a very good extent, the transition degrees of freedom as well as the rotational degrees of freedom. The vibrations, it kind of depends on the molecule, but most of them are already in the vibrational ground state. So it's not so important here. But, and so what happens is that we end up with a very cold, internally cold beam with a very small distribution of say, rotational states and velocities. And a similar thing happens in buffer gas cells where we use instead of adiabatic expansion, we cool by collisions with other species like helium, for example. So we introduce other atoms and molecules and by collisions with something that is held at a very low temperatures, such as for Kelvin for a helium buffer gas cell, then everything will lose their energy to this other thing, which is a concept that we'll come back later for the ion trapping or ion trapped species. And then in helium and droplets, you go even further as I was listening to this morning. So you go to the superfluid regime where you might actually get to even lower temperature, but still through collisions with something that takes away the energy mediated by collisions. Now, the other option is of course to just populate a single quantum state. And that is relatively popularly done by pumping a specific state using a laser. So going, trying to put all of the population in a specific quantum state or selecting a specific quantum state from an ensemble that you start off with by using the specific properties. So for example, the Stark energy or the Zeeman energy, the Stark effect or the Zeeman effect of a specific quantum state such that you can kind of select it out of the original beam that you have and then manipulate it in some way. So for example, as Henry was saying, my PhD work was done on trying to slow down these very fast molecular beams using Zeeman deceleration. And so applying magnetic fields to slow down in the beam frame reference to trying to get the collision or velocity lower. And so these methods, I mean, it's easy to concentrate on how we would like to have the reactants. And so kind of how we would like to start off with, but it's also easy to underestimate how important it is to then also control or probe the products. So not only would we like to have very well-defined starting states in the reagents, but also we would like to know if the products come out with a specific distribution of vibrational excitation or not or what their energy is and so on. And so as we were talking about this morning with VMI, for example, right? So both of these things are very important. And so I think that a lot of the techniques that are used are kind of borrowed from the physics world where people have been trying to control exactly these same degrees of freedom for years and years in atoms and then eventually molecules. And in cold chemistry, we're trying to kind of combine in creative new ways, let's say, some of these techniques to try and with a lot of effort. So we're trying to like maneuver, like gain one degree of freedom at a time and trying to understand better and try to control better the system to understand what the various forms of energy mean in terms of the outcome of the reaction. And so indeed what we find is that there is a lot of groups around the world that study controlled chemistry with a series of techniques. So I've alluded to some of them earlier. So when we make molecular beams, so there are people that then to study a reaction, usually you typically need, unless it's a photochemical reaction, you need two reagents. So you can take two of these beams and cross them together and smash the two particles apart and see what happens. And you can either try to kind of manipulate with fields the individual beams first or not. But this is a typical kind of cross beam setup as we'll see later on in the talk. But then if you are trying to also decrease the kinetic energy, like for example, I was saying earlier with using electrical magnetic fields to slow down the beams again with, you can also just decrease the angle between the two beams and even merge the beams together. So bend one of the beams into the path of the other such that the relative velocity between the species becomes very low. And so there is a lot of experiments that also use this kind of trick, which is very cool. And a lot of experiments also use traps. There is not just beams, so we can trap neutral molecules, ionic molecules and then all kind of combination of beam plus trap experiment or trap plus trap, hybrid trap experiments, as well as then the little helium nano reactors where people are trying to study and look at chemical reactions as well as buffer gas cells. So I guess that part of the reason for this slide being here is to give you a general overview of what we're trying to do. The second very important part is to answer the first question that I typically get, which is what is the temperature of your experiment? The answer to that is it's complicated. And I think it's more useful to think about it as individual degrees of freedom. But now that we've kind of defined the problem under the physical part, we can perhaps move more to the chemistry side. And before I do that, I just quickly mentioned that in the first part of the talk, I'll concentrate on the work that I've done in the past year or so, which is about controlling the structural properties of molecules, so the relative orientation of atoms in space. And the second part is going to be about the work that we start in this year, which is more on the controlling rotations in molecules and study astrochemistry, as we'll see to where the end. So, but then to move more a little bit towards the chemistry and give a brief introduction and make sure that everyone is on the same page, we're stuffed off by saying that molecules have atoms inside them. And the atoms usually, when we have the same number of the same type of atoms, we have isomers. And so we have the same chemical formula, same number of the same atoms. And they can either be connected differently to give structural isomers, like you can see here, where the fluorine is on a different carbon atom, or they can be connected exactly the same way but pointed differently in space. And here is where chiral molecules come in or diastereisomers that are not, so as opposed to enantiomers is they're not mirror images, but instead they come in two flavors. So we have cis and trans isomers, where we have two functional groups or two substituents that are either on the same side or opposite side of a double bond. And the good and bad thing about double bonds is that they're very stiff, they're very hard and so they don't rotate very easily. And so these two species they effectively don't usually interconvert into each other unless you give it a lot of energy. On the other hand, conformers or isomers, which is what I'll talk about in this talk, they are similar in the sense that they have the substituents either on the same side or opposite side, but instead of a double bond is actually with respect to a single bond. And so they're usually depicted like you see here as a Newton diagram. And this is looking down on the single bond. So if I re-plot this molecule, you can see that there is a methyl group up here and this is connected to a carbon to carbon single bond. And then the second methyl group is just staggered but on the same kind of, on the same side of the carbon-carbon bond. But you can see that this single bond can rotate as opposed to the double bond that we saw on this side. And so this conformer can become the other conformer, which is the one where the two substituents are on opposite side of the molecule. And we call the cis-trans isomers cis and trans because that makes sense. But when we're talking about conformers and rotomers, the nomenclature gets a bit more complicated. So this would be gauche in the sense that so it's not exactly cis because these two are not exactly on top of each other. They're slightly staggered because that's a potential edge minimum as opposed to like a transition state. And then the other one is called anti but they're also called S cis and S trans. So effectively to simplify manners, in this talk, whenever we refer to either gauche or cis is stuff being on the same side and anti or trans is on opposite sides. And it's always about single bonds and not double bonds. So the next question is what kind of important chemistry questions can we try to address? What kind of music are we trying to understand in a very, very specific way that we want to be able to control whether a bond is effectively pointing one way or the other. And so a very important reaction in chemistry is called the Diels-Wald reaction. You might have heard of it before. So it's a reaction between a diene that I'm showing you here on the left. So a molecule with two double bonds, two carbon double bonds and a dienophile which is an alkene in this case that effectively is a lover of the diene in a sense from the name. And this is very important reaction because it lets us increase the molecular complexity. So these two species will react together to give us a hexacylhexane ring which looks a lot like one of the basic components of any kind of large molecule or drug or whatever it is. So, but the thing that really makes this reaction important is the fact that usually it happens through a concerted mechanism which means that both bonds, both new CT bonds are formed at the same time. And that makes it by organic chemistry standards a very controlled reaction in the sense that if we imagine having more substituents on either this side or this side, it is very easy to then predict exactly not only which way around the two different components are going to react but also which radio selectivity the new molecule is going to have but also which stereo selectivity whether they're going to go this way or this other way. And so we can tell whether one functional group is going to point up or point down in the product. And that is very, very powerful if you're trying to make controlled kind of organic chemistry. On the other hand, so this is the nice feature about the do's or the reaction. On the other hand is a reaction between two neutral molecules that goes through a transition state. It usually has a very large activation energy. It takes a lot of heat and a lot of time for it to work. And so usually what works a lot better is when one of the species, so specifically the dienophile is either polar or it's ionic. Like in the case of the reaction that we're studying. And in that case, it becomes and also in the case where we have weird asymmetric substituents another reaction mechanism becomes very important which is the stepwise mechanism where we make one bond to begin with to form a diuretic or intermediate. And then the second bond is formed at a later date. And so you can see how for organic chemistry purposes this wouldn't be very good because you run the risk of losing all of the stereo selectivity that you had to begin with. But on our side from our point of view what is interesting is that the fact that although the concertive mechanism can only be undergone by the cisconformer of the dien the stepwise mechanism is also available to the transconformer. And so even though in the liquid phase we cannot get a beaker of cis and a beaker of trans and see how if they react differently if a reaction happens at all in the gas phase you can. And indeed, this is what we do. What we're trying to do is to understand the fundamental mechanistic details of in this case, the Diels-Alder reaction depending on the conformational structure of the molecule that we start with and trying to see whether the pointing the group from one side of the molecule or the other side of the molecule what kind of difference does it make to how fast the reaction goes and what products we get. So in the first part of the talk which is the structural part it's kind of subdivided into different parts and so in the, at the beginning I'll tell you a little bit about the work that was done in Stefan's group before Avian joint. So that was about confirmation and selecting neutral molecules. And then the work that I've been doing for the past year and a bit which is about confirmation and selecting ionic species and that all leads to trying to study fully confirmation selected ion molecule reaction which is what we're planning to do in the future. But let's start off with the neutral molecules and specifically the molecule that we're talking about is called di-bromobutodyne DBB. So it's very similar to the one that I showed you in the previous slide so it's got two double bonds between carbon one and two and between carbon three and four and the middle carbons have two bromine atoms attached to them. Now these bromine atoms can either be on the same side of the molecule in the Gauss conformer or on opposite sides in the transcomfomer. And the beautiful thing about this is that the Gauss conformer has got a di-bromobut a quite a large one actually, 2.3 device whilst the transcomfomer does not. And that means that if we apply an electric field a strong one, the Gauss conformer will feel it and the transcomfomer will feel nothing at all which is exactly what we do. So we're trying to, so we're using a technique that was actually developed by Johan Cooper and Garam Mayer and Henrik Spetsch-Deffenfeld and is being used in a few labs already that is electrostatic deflection using the stark effect. And so to begin with, we start with a molecular beam like we talked about before. So we start with a supersonic expansion of a mixture of these two molecules. So they come in a liquid. So you put a little bit, we have to entrain it, entrain the sample into a noble gas, into a seed gas to make a molecular beam. But effectively you start with a cold and fast molecular beam of a mixture of the two. And then we fly it through an electrostatic deflector and if I'm showing you a cut-through of the electrodes and the electric field that you get you can see that you have a large gradient inside the electrostatic deflector. So this fast beam is traveling through and the Gauch molecules with their large dipole moment will be deflected towards the high field gradient and the high field electrode and the trans molecules will just fly through where this little arrow is, which is the center of where the molecular beam is centered. And so effectively we peel off some of the molecules from the rest of the beam that contains the other molecules. And by the end of it, then we can effectively shoot either this part of the beam or this other part of the beam to a specific target that we choose. So we can study the selective reactivity of these two molecules to an ion that in this case is propion ions. So the same ion for both. So the propion ion, we'll talk a little bit more about the ionic targets that we're making, but for now let's just say that we put the propion ion in an ion trap and we cool it down. So we have a static target held in an ion trap and we shoot the beam that is either got mainly, that there is either got only Gauch, DBB or only trans DBB. And what we do is we shine this beam for a certain amount of time. So say 10 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes and after each of these time, we then shoot everything that is in the ion trap down into a mass spectrum to see what the ions that are present in the trap are. And by doing this, then we can record effectively the kinetics of this reaction. And when this was done, we could see that even though you might intuitively expect that only the concerted mechanism occurs and so only the Gauch conformer reacts, we see that both conformers react with capture limited rates. So there is no barrier in the potential energy surface between the reagents and the products. And so the Gauch, interestingly the Gauch reacts faster but that kind of makes sense because he's got a diaper moment. So when the molecule and the ions are approaching, the long range part of the potential is more attractive for the Gauch because it has this extra kind of attraction term that we add to the potential compared to the trans but effectively it was the first time that it could be seen that both the concerted and stepwise mechanisms are feasible and happen at the same time because as we said before, the trans conformer could not react unless the stepwise mechanism was possible. And so by the end of this short part, we know that we have a confirmation selected source of neutral molecules that we can use in our ion molecule reactions. And so let's move on to the ionic molecules. So what we're trying to do, what we would like to do is to also have the ionic target rather than just having propane ions, we would also like to have control over the conformation of the molecule that is inside the ion trap, so in our static target. And in our static test, so as I said before, we are not only trapping the molecules, but we're also cooling them. And some of you will be very, very familiar with Coulomb crystals, but bear with me because some other people might not be. And so what we do effectively is in a similar way to what we were saying before about using, for example, helium buffer gas or helium nano droplets to collisionally cool other things, we can also do this with ions in ion traps. So we can have trapped ions. And if we choose the right ions, so for example, in our case calcium ions that has a closed optical cycle, we can laser cool it. So we can use a closed optical cycle to remove energy until the ions are so cold that they are trapped, but at the same time they have very little energy and they tend to kind of sit in specific positions within the ion trap. And so it's a little bit like a very frustrated system where all of the ions want to sit as far apart from each other as possible because they're all positively charged and so they hate each other, but at the same time they're still confined within the trap. And so they form these Coulomb crystals because that look a little bit like crystalline solids, but of course it's still in the gas phase and they're very, very dilute. But the way that I like to think about it is almost as if you can see the potential energy minima. So the minimum, the position where the energy of a single ion would minimize given all of the interactions that are present in that trap. And so we use those as a heat sink. So effectively we can add more things in the same way that we added to a seed gas in a molecular beam or in a buffer gas cell or in helium nanodoplet. We can add more ions and let them collide with the laser cooled cast of ions to remove the energy from the ions that we're adding. And indeed this technique was developed here in Mikhail Durson's group, where they first saw for the first time that you could, the way that we used to describe it is sympathetically cool. So other molecular ions, not just other atoms but also molecules, you can make them translationally cold just by adding them into one such Coulomb crystal. And so if you add species that are lighter, they will be more tightly confined and they will sit in the middle of the crystal. And the other species because, so we're not directly laser cooling them because they don't have very good transitions that it would be easy to do so. But so as a result, they do not fluoresce. So the fluorescence comes from continuously laser cooling and the laser cooling cycle. So we cannot observe them directly but they show up as like an absence of fluorescence from the other species. And so here you can see that when I add the lysospecies in this case N2 plus, it sits in the center of the crystal. And if I show you some images from the previous work where we added propene ions that are actually heavier than calcium, you can see that they sit on the side as well. So this is a pristine crystal without anything. And then once we add molecular ions, they either sit in the center or they form kind of outer shells. And I wasn't originally gonna show this but I realized that perhaps not everyone had seen. So because we can watch these crystals, we can also make videos. Not everyone might have seen videos of Coulomb crystals. And if you are somebody that has not seen them, I would like to encourage you to go and see them in real life since you have a lab that actually has them which is much, much better than seeing them in a video. So you should convince somebody to give you a lab tour in that case. But in the absence of that, for now we'll do with videos from our own lab where in here, so in the first one, this is a single calcium ion that is continuously being laser cooled and in this video, I'm showing you affirmation of a very small crystal where you can see the different calcium ions that are coming from an oven kind of forming a small crystal in real life, in real time. And then the second video is of the loading. So you can see that as a function of time, a core is adding to the center of the crystal itself as we add N2 plus. And but as we said when, so I also wanted to give an idea of what it looks like because it's much more relevant for the next part of the talk when we add things that are much, much heavier. So the heavier things will form outer shells. And in here, so I'm showing you a simulation of the cooling. So this is actually a simulation that shows the central rods of the trap and to scale it shows the size of a Coulomb crystal that is made of calcium and then some xenon ions that are traveling around. And if you look here, you can see that it's, oh, there you go, a little bit better. So the red ones are the xenon ions and you can see that the heavier the things and the less cool they are and the more they have kinetic energy still, the less confined they are and the less cool they are. And so they don't form as neat structures as the main core of the crystal but they still kind of embedded. Yes. So this is how we cool down the translation of the ions that we put in the trap. And the emphasis here should be on the translation. So the internal degrees of freedom usually do not get cooled by sympathetic cooling. And the specific ion that we would like to put in the trap or that we have put in the trap is amino styrene. So I'm showing you here, we have an assistant transversion. So it's a benzene ring with a vinyl group. So CT double bond and then an amino group at the meta position. So three carbon atoms down in the ring. And depending on whether the vinyl group is pointing towards the amino group or away from it, we have either the cis or the trans. And luckily, these two molecules have very different energy levels. So indeed here I'm showing you an energy level diagram from a paper that studied the REMPY spectroscopy of it. So resonance and hands, multi-photon ionization. And so the ground state, the ground electronic state S naught. And the first excited electronic state S1 and the ionic state D naught are all at slightly different energies, which is great because then we can just use different lasers or lasers at different frequencies to either make one or the other which is exactly what we do with REMPY. So indeed we can use a single, so a one color REMPY, so one single laser that will take us from the S naught to S1 and then a second photon will be absorbed to go above the ionization continuum and form an ion. And if we scan the frequency of this laser, we see at some point that we hit a resonance where from the vibrational ground state of the electronic ground state, we end up in the vibrational ground state of the first electronically excited state. And then the second photon ionizes the molecule and then we can detect it in our time of flight. And then about 200 inverse centimeters after, we also get the same resonance for the trans instead. So we know that if we have one laser and we park it here, we're only ionizing cis. And if we have another or the same laser if we park it here instead, we only ionize trans. However, the second photon brings us above the ionization energy. So we still have all of the extra energy that that photon has goes into vibrations. And so we're not in the vibrational ground state. And so to make sure that we make the molecules in the vibrational ground state, we want to use two color rampi instead. So we fix the frequency of the first laser to these transitions that we looked at already. And then we can scan a second laser. So by scanning the frequency of the second laser, originally we get, initially we get no ions, no ions, no ions, and then we hit a threshold of ionization. And so if we sit just above the threshold for the cis and the trans, then we know that we're making the two ions exactly in the vibrational ground state of the ionic ground state. And this is how we control that degree of freedom. So the next step is to actually do it, but inside the trap. So we start off with a mixture of amino siren, the same way that di-brombovisodine was made. So we entrain it in a noble gas and then we make a molecular beam, but we do not make it go through the electro-static deflector, instead we wait until it reaches the center of the trap. And then where we have already pre-prepared a Coulomb crystal. And then we ionize it there, one conformal enzyme. So we either ionize cis or trans, and then doing this we can load. So we can see that before we have the molecular beam and the lasers on, we have a pristine Coulomb crystal. And afterwards we have a dented Coulomb crystal. So you can see here on the outside that there is some perturbations. Now, you might say that it doesn't look as different as the previous images, but bear in mind that this molecule is about 119. So it is 119 atomic units. So it's very heavy, it's much heavier than calcium, there's only 40. Which means that the molecules sit very far apart and they will not distort the image as much. But luckily we don't just have to believe this low dent, we can also eject the ions into a mass spec. And we see that indeed they arrive at exactly where we predict them to arrive. Now most of you will be wondering why there is two peaks. So this is the same molecule. So it's a ministerian ions. But because of the way that we're running a mass spec in this case is a low resolution. And because of the asymmetry in our trap, we end up having effectively a cloud of ions above the Coulomb crystal and a cloud of ion below the Coulomb crystal. So the cloud of ion above will have a longer flight time of acceleration time before it reaches the free flight region. And so it will be accelerated more, it will arrive faster and it will give us this peak. And the cloud that is sitting at the bottom will have a shorter flight path to the field free region. And so it will arrive later. But we can also apply extra pulses to our MCP to make sure that they will arrive at the same time. It's just that usually we work on the low resolution mode. And so I'm showing you this graph instead. The other thing that we can do is that we can take this trace and then we can integrate under it because the signal will be proportional to the number of ions that hit our MCPs. And so if we look at the amounts that we get, we can then go back and check that we are actually loading either cis or trans. And so to do this, for example, if we set our first laser on resonance for either cis or trans, and then we set the second laser we put away, so below the ionization threshold, we get nothing or almost nothing. And then above the ionization threshold, then we get a lot of loaded ions and molecules of either cis or trans depending on the frequencies that we chose. And then if we set the second laser to be at the frequency that is above the ionization threshold and then change the frequency of the first laser instead. So if we are off resonance compared to these two peaks, then we get nothing. And then if we're on resonance, we get two color loading. And then what we can also do is to block the second laser to check how much of the ionization just comes from one color, which is these other, this empty traces. So we can tell that we get about 10 to 20% contribution from one color, which means that the 80 to 90% of our molecules are actually in the vibrational grand state of the ions. Right, so now the last step before we actually get to like, collide things together and see what happens is to see whether, well, it's all well and good to actually having loaded either cis or trans into a trap. However, we would like to make sure that if we have loaded cis after five minutes or 10 minutes, we still have cis and it hasn't isomerized and gone to trans or the other way around. And we don't think that this should happen because from theory, we know that the ionization barrier between or the azomerization barrier between the two is about 260 milliliter volt, but we would like to have a confirmationally selected method of effectively detecting either cis or trans so that we can prove this experimentally. And this was, so where we're trying to use this femtosecond laser fragmentation, so strong field fragmentation because it was observed, for example, for di-brombe-visidine, it was observed that a femtosecond laser will fragment the gorsh conformer much more than the trans conformer. So that there's a lot of the conformationalist effects that have been observed after strong field fragmentation. And so this is what we've tried to do. So here I'm showing you again, the mass pack that I showed you before, which is when we do not shine a femtosecond laser at the ions after they're trapped and sympathetically cooled. And then when we do that, we start seeing fragments. So in this particular case, the fragment is the loss of the vinyl group. So this particular fragment here. And then what we can do is we can change the conditions and keep repeating this and estimating how much, how many ions we have each time when we do it for cis or for trans, which is what I'm showing you in this rather complicated plot. Well, I mean, so we have the fragments on the top panel, so the signal that we integrate under these two peaks and the parent on the bottom panel. And then we have two ejection conditions. So the low resolution mass pack, when we operate our mass spectrum in low resolution or high resolution. And I'm plotting this for cis and trans for 20 different measurements per condition. So we always do not only cis and trans, but also with the femtosecond laser on compared to with the femtosecond laser off. So that we can do a differential measurement and always subtract the contribution from when there is no femtosecond laser. And you can see that there isn't that much of a difference. The only panel that is a little bit more promising is parent ion and high resolution. And because all this data was collected across different days, and there could have been a lot of fluctuations, we decided to collect more of this data on the same day. And if I plot when the laser is, femtosecond laser is on minus off or on divided by off, so the ratio, we can see that there is a difference and we might be able to, by using the difference between the cis and the trans, we might be able to detect them selectively but we're still working on it. We are not seeing as much of a difference as we hoped, but the tricky part is that we don't have very high laser intensities. So we have about one order of magnitude less than when they studied the fragmentation in DBB. And the reason for that is because we're trying to fragment things that are not in a beam and so they're not continuously replenished, but they are a very finite number of molecules that is probably 50 to 100 that are trapped and the more tightly we focus and the less signal we get because we have much less chances of actually hitting one of these molecules. And so if we try to increase the ionization volume, then our laser intensity decreases and then we don't get as much multi-portal effects. And so it's a cat 22, but so we're still working on this part. But to summarize this part of the talk, we have, we can generate, I mean, a star in confirmation is let it be either in the system, the transconformer and then we can load it either one or the other into a Coulomb crystal. And we're working on confirmation is let it be detecting them to show them that we can keep them before we move on to the next part, which will be to study fully confirmation is let it ion neutral reactions. I think you're allowed to ask questions. Please. Perfect time. Yes. Not only questions. I mean, questions are always welcome, but if you have advice, that's even more welcome. So, right. So this is the end of the structural part. So let's move on a little bit more towards what, so the part of the things that we're going to be doing in the future is studying fully confirmation is let it ion neutral reactions. But on the other hand, if you allow me to go back to one of the early slides, I've showed you how electrostatic deflection can be used to separate different conformers that have different diver moments. And here you can see a rendering of where we have and we can just about see the ion trap with the Coulomb crystals trapped here and the cooling lasers. And from the deflector, you get either one conformer or the other that is deflected differently, so peeled off. However, different rotational states also have different diver moments or different effective diver moments. And so we can also do experiments where we use the deflector to separate, for example, in this case, water in the rotational ground state as opposed to water in the first rotationally excited state. And thinking back to all of the different degrees of freedom that we can control, you might intuitively think that in the mess of chemistry, having a single more quantum of rotational excitation is not going to make that much of a difference. It's not going to change anyone's life, which arguably is true, but there is a growing body of evidence that shows that the addition of a single quantum of rotational excitation actually has a lot of different effects. So it can increase the rate of ionization, such as in this experiment with H2 and metastable helium in a merged beam setup at the Weizmann Institute in Ednerwitz's lab. But it can also decrease the rate of reaction, like in this experiment between water and N2H+, in the setup that I showed you, so in Stefan's lab in Basel. And also it can change the product branching ratio of a reaction like here for OCS and metastable helium in a cross beam setup that is also in Stefan's lab in Basel. And so even though you might not think that a single quantum of rotational excitation would make much difference, it seems like it does. And different rotational states sometimes end up acting as distinct chemical species. And this is particularly important. So usually, under standard conditions, rotational states have got such small energy spacing that whatever collision scrambles everything that you're trying to make and it doesn't, you end up with a thermal mixture and it doesn't make that much of a difference. Now, one place where it does make a difference is space. In the interstellar medium, you have a collision every 14 days and so on and we know that kinetics overpowers thermodynamics and so we have a very, very different environment. And as you all know in space, so especially in the space in between the stars that is kind of opaque because there's a lot of molecular clouds that prevent the light from the stars from reaching us, there is a variety of different molecules that exist. So in diffuse and dense interstellar clouds, different molecules can be formed depending on how hard the environment is. And these molecules can be used for a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes, including probing the local environment. So for example, looking at the temperature and the pressure of a specific cloud in a specific position of space, but also they can be used to predict the evolution in time of a molecular cloud. So for example, predict the stellar life cycle that I'm showing you here in this image is punctuated at different stages by the presence of different molecules. So if you can detect those molecules and also if you can understand why they're there and simulate them, then you can better understand how the whole life cycle works and what is going to happen next, which is typically what we try to do in science. And the third part, which is also very, not to be underestimated, is that the chemistry in space is very cool. As in it's very unusual, it's very unexpected. A lot of molecules are very exotic by Earth standards. They're highly unsaturated and it's kind of a playground that we don't usually get to play with because of the very harsh conditions. And so the way that we try to understand the presence of these molecules and how they form and how they get distracted in space is by using astrochemical models. And these are effectively large models that contain a lot of different reactions that are thought to occur in space based on the molecules that are detected from space. And they try to effectively evolve over time and predict the abundances of the different species. And to do that, they use databases to tell them how fast a specific reaction will go and what the branching ratios of the reaction will be. So what the products are. However, the vast majority of this data that exists in these databases, about 80% has actually never been studied in the lab. And so it's effectively educated guesses. And so there is more work that needs to be done to understand and to actually measure in the lab how these reaction rates and branching ratios effectively are. So measure them experimentally. But also there is no inclusion at all of state selectivity. So a water molecule in the rotational grand state is expected to always simulated to behave exactly the same as a water molecule in the first rationally excited state. And as we saw, they can act as distinct chemical species. So the three experiments I showed you earlier, they cause a difference that is between 20% to 300%. So which might not sound too large in terms of reaction rates and branching ratios and so on. But once you put it in a network of lots of reactions being interconnected, it can have huge ripple effects in what you get out as abundances of molecules. And so part of the very large discrepancies that they have between or they're observed between the abundances that are predicted compared to the ones that are actually present in space. Our attribute to the fact that we lack experimental data effectively. And so to cut the long story short, what we're planning to do is to study a series of reaction that contain carbon that build molecular complexity in space. So effectively making molecules one carbon atom at a time. And we are planning to use exactly the same setup as I showed you before. So we have a beam of neutral molecules that we can separate based on the rotational state. So either ground or the first excited rotational state. And we're planning to trap carbocation. So small ones like C plus or CH plus and then look at how different isomers are formed as a result of the reaction. And so as you might remember the cartoon from the beginning, as you see here, we'd like to see, for example, if we have water molecules in the electronic vibrational and rotational ground state, they react and we measure how they react. And then we would like to see how adding a single quantum or say rotational excitation changes how fast they react and whether the branching ratio between HCO plus or HLC plus, which are the main products, how that's going to be affected. And having said that, I would like to thank Leigh and Stefan, the work that I work with and all of the people that worked on the DBB work. So the neutral part that I presented at the beginning as well as all of the support staff in Basel and the rest of the village group and the numerous project students that I've had in the last year and a few months that have helped us with the data analysis and the experimental work. And thank you for your attention. I'll take any questions or advice anytime. Thank you.