PhD Work

My PhD research was somewhat interdisciplinary (physics and chemistry).  We characterized the scattering of diatomic nitrogen from the Si(100) surface using REMPI spectroscopy.  The relevant dynamics are the domain of physical chemistry, but the relevant hardware is more at home in a physics department.  This sort of molecule-surface scattering experiment has been around for half a century, but systems like N₂/Si(100) where large deformations of the surface can dominate the dynamics are poorly studied.  We found some evidence that, between 100-400meV incident kinetic energy, the surface becomes "squishy."  More precisely, the N₂ molecules transition from bouncing mostly elastically off of the silicon to dissipating an enormous fraction of their incident energy.  Exactly what is happening microscopically is still somewhat unclear.