This week, the first user beamtime in the 2019 calendar year, the DESIREE infrastructure hosted users from the group of Paul Scheier at the University of Innsbruck. The measurements lead by PhD student Paul Martini are aimed at measuring the electron affinity of C60-. This value has been the subject of debate for many years, and DESIREE experiments may help solve the mystery.

What is your research in general:

We research and utilize helium nano droplets to study cold chemistry and structural propitiates of molecules and clusters.

How will your experiments at DESIREE further your research?

It is important for our research to be able to compare measurements performed on isolated C60- with helium nano droplet C60-.

Are there any unique capabilities of DESIREE that you are exploiting?

We will utilize the cold temperatures and long storage times of DESIREE since this is crucial to our experiment.

How do you find it to work at the infrastructure?

Drinking coffee and eating cookies is really nice. We get to work with a lot of experts this week and get to learn a lot about all the different parts of the experiment.