Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The structure of atoms and small molecules is known to great accuracy. However, when it comes to the question of how they behave in collsions and/or the presence of strong laser fields the situation is much less clear. This is so because of their quantum physical nature and because of the complexity of the many-body problem of physics: it can be formulated, but it cannot be solved in closed form. The proposed research program aims at providing some answers to this problem by theoretical analysis and numerical calculations. We will look at ion-atom and ion-molecule collisions, and at collisions which are embedded in a laser pulse to be used to steer the quantum dynamics of the system. The latter will be of interest for applications in the long run. Ion-molecule collisions, especially those involving water molecules, are attracting such immediate interest: They are important for understanding the radiation damage of biological tissue. We are pursuing our studies because we are fundamentally interested in the physics, and also because there are significant applications in medical physics and related fields. In the long term our studies will not only benefit the field of tumor radiation therapy, but also the more complex field of damage to larger molecules such as DNA.