Laser - induced electron transfer reactions

Hot electrons are induced in a metal by femtosecond laser irradiation. These hot electrons may induce reactions in adsorbed molecules. The local imaging of the reaction's products with the STM allows to locally determine the dependence of these processes from the adsorption site. The project aims primarily to find out the dependence of the processes and their lifetimes from the local adsorption geometry of the molecules. CO and D₂O on Cu(111) have been successfully investigated and the following observations made: CO molecules desorb only from the island, diffusion depends on the molecule density, clusters rearrange depending on the island size.

The majority of the discovered processes show that the newly established combination of TT-sTM with fs-LASER opens a completely new research field.