3 Optical studies of ion–molecule reactions

Abstract

This review outlines the advances that have been made in recent years in the study of elementary gas-phase processes involving molecular ions by employing optical techniques and spectroscopic methodologies. Two particularly fruitful areas of experimental study have been the analysis of VIS/UV emissions from ion–molecule reactions to determine product state distributions and experiments in which resonance enhanced multiphoton ionisation (REMPI) is used to study the effect of ion reagent vibrational energy on reactivity. Studies in which product state distributions in ion–molecule reactions are determined by either analysis of IR emissions or laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) remain rare.