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SYAU: Guest Country Symposium Austria: SSelected Highlights of AMOP in Austria"

SYAU 1: Selected highlights of AMOP in Austria

SYAU 1.3: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 4. März 2026, 11:45–12:15, RW 1

Charged Helium Nanodroplets: A Cold Laboratory for Molecular Ions — •Elisabeth Gruber — Institut für Ionenphysik und Angewandte Physik, Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

Helium nanodroplets provide a highly versatile environment for trapping and cooling dopant species to ultralow temperatures. In particular, highly charged helium droplets open exciting new avenues for investigating fundamental physical and chemical processes.

In this talk, I will focus on the use of highly charged helium droplets for the efficient formation of helium-tagged molecular ions, which enables high-resolution electronic and vibrational spectroscopy of cold molecular ions [1]. This approach allows us to obtain precise absorption spectra of astrochemical relevant ions [2-4]. Furthermore, I will discuss how the unique low-temperature environment of helium nanodroplets can be exploited to study chemical reactions under cryogenic conditions. To extend these studies to longer timescales, up to several seconds or even minutes, we have recently developed a novel setup for trapping charged helium droplets in an electrostatic ion trap [5]. I will present first results from these experiments and provide an outlook on future directions in this research field.

[1] S. Bergmeister et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 94, 055105 (2023), [2] L. Ganner et al., Astrophys. J. 993, 47 (2025), [3] L. Ganner et al., ACS Earth Space Chem. 9, 2694 (2025), [4] S. A. Krasnokutski et al., Astrophys. J. 982, 34 (2025), [5] M. Veternik et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., accepted (2025)

Keywords: helium nanodroplets; helium-tagging spectroscopy; helium nanodroplet trapping; cold molecular ions