Cyclic Aromatic molecules are the subject of continued research due to their highly advantageous characteristics which can be exploited in the areas of pharmaceuticals, material science and nano-electronics. While the defining properties and criteria for a molecule to be considered aromatic are very specific and well established, the degree of aromaticity of these molecules and their corresponding ordering remains a source of continued debate. Given that the macroscopic aromatic properties are fundamentally rooted in the underlying electronic structure and molecular dynamics, these properties can be probed in numerous ways. One such method is to exploit the strong laser field as it pertains to non-linear light-matter interaction. More specifically, the study of photoionization, as a direct resultant effect of strong field light-matter interaction, gives us direct insight into electronic and spatial properties as captured via mass spectroscopy. As a strong-field process, photoionization is effective because the variables that influence its results are also the ones that define aromaticity thus a correlation can be postulated. Other strong field advanced techniques to probe aromacity such as High Harmonic Generation (HHG) have already been successful shown by our group to be effective spectroscopic tools. In this way, photoionization provides supporting evidence to enhance the understanding of these novel spectroscopic tools. This thesis demonstrates that photoionization mass spectroscopy can be used as a probe into the aromaticity order of 5-membered cyclic aromatic molecules. Furthermore, the thesis will show that photoionization results correlate with the previously conducted HHG studies in this area thus further supporting these techniques as sensitive spectroscopic tools into aromaticity. The first part of this thesis describes the characterization of aromatic molecules and the corresponding process to obtain photoionization results that can be correlated to aromaticity. In the second part, these results are compared to the theoretical model and HHG demonstrating consistent results. The third and final component of this thesis describes future work, namely two-colour control of photoionization which is intended to provide greater resolution and variation of photoionization spectra thereby providing a more comprehensive and conclusive understanding of the proposed correlation with aromaticity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/37098 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Bagga, Amit |
| Contributors | Bhardwaj, Ravi |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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