Dr. Elbio Dagotto

Professor
Ph.D., Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina, 1984

Office: 432 Science and Engineering Building
Phone: 865-974-9512 (office), 865-974-1602, or 865-974-6172 (lab)
Fax: 865-974-7843
dagotto@magnet.fsu.edu

INTERDISCIPLINARY PHYSICS

Physical chemistry: physics of negative ions

Compton Research Group Home Page

My activities involve experimental research at the University of Tennessee and primarily the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Our group has pioneered studies of multiphoton ionization spectroscopy in the gas phase. Multiphoton ionization of supersonic molecular beams of atoms molecules and clusters allows us to perform simultaneous ion mass analysis, photoelectron spectroscopy of the intermediate states and kinetic energy analysis of the dissociative ionization products. An area of current interest involves the use of dye lasers in the study of elementary chemical reactions, particularly those involving electron transfer. Collaborative studies with groups at UT (Adcock, Tuinman, Guiochon, etc.) and Oak Ridge (Hettich, Sachleben, Wignall) are devoted to the production and characterization of nanoclusters. These new clusters provide the framework for tests of elementary concepts in physics and chemistry. The graph below show the electron attachment cross section recorded by graduate student R. Huang (U. Penn.) for the all Carbon C60 Fullerene molecule. Not easily seen is the attachment thereshold at -0.15eV.

Brief Vita

Professor Robert N. Compton earned a B.A. in physics from Berea College in 1960, an M.S. in physics from the University of Florida in 1963 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Tennessee in 1965. He was a Ford Foundation Professor of Physics at the University of Tennessee from 1968 to 1971. He was a visiting senior scientist at the FOM Institute in Amsterdam, Holland in 1979. He has been the leader of the Molecular Physics Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 1968. Dr. Compton is a Fellow of the American Physics Society and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is also co-founder of Comstock, Inc., a scientific instrument company.

Selected Publications

D.P. Armstrong, D.A. Harkins, R.N. Compton, and D. Ding, "Multiphoton Ionization of Uranium Hexafluoride," J. Chem. Phys. 1994, 100(1), 28-43 .
K.A. Affholter, S.J. Henderson, G.D. Wignall, G.J. Bunick, R.E. Haufler, and R.N. Compton, "Structural characterization of C60 and C70 Fullereness by Small-Angle Neutron Scattering," J. Chem. Phys. 1993, 99, 9224 .
Andrei A. Gakh, Albert A. Tuinman, and James L. Adcock, "Selective Synthesis and Structure Determination of C60F48, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1994, 116, 819-820.