Outline of Publicly Offered Research

Program A01-3 New approach to astrochemical reaction dynamics by a high-precision superconducting X-ray calorimeter
Principal Investigator KUMA, Susumu (RIKEN)

It is known that there exist almost 200 species of molecules and ions in the universe, despite of its chemically unfavorable conditions as low temperature and low density. It is one of the key subjects in astrochemistry to understand the production and decomposition process of these molecules. The ion-molecule reaction, the most important mechanism in the interstellar chemistry with the large reaction cross section, has been studied widely because it can proceed even at very low temperature. Recently, we have developed a cryogenic electrostatic ion storage ring (RICE) at RIKEN to study this type of molecular collisional processes at a temperature of 4 K.


Experimental setup of the superconducting X-ray detector (TES) for astrochemical reaction dynamics studied with the RIKEN cryogenic electrostatic ion storage ring (RICE) In this study we aim at developing a new neutral molecule detector utilizing a superconducting transition-edge sensor (TES) which have been originally developed for X-ray energy dispersion spectroscopy in X-ray astrophysics. With the excellent energy resolution of the TES microcalorimeter, it is possible to determine and identify the mass of the neutral molecule produced in low-temperature chemical reaction in RICE. The novel combination of RICE and TES in this study enhances the application of astronomical detectors to the areas of fundamental sciences.

Members

Principal Investigator
KUMA, Susumu
(RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research)
Research Collaborators
Shinji Okada (Chubu University)
Shinya Yamada (Rikkyo University)

Reference Materials

  • Y. Nakano, Y Enomoto, T. Masunaga, S. Menk, P. Bertier, and T. Azuma, “RICE: RIken Cryogenic Electrostatic ion storage ring,” Rev. Sci. Instrum. 88, 033110 (2017), DOI:10.1063/1.4978454.
  • Y. Nakano, R. Igosawa, S. Iida, S. Okada, M. Lindley, S. Menk, R. Nagaoka, T. Hashimoto, S. Yamada, T. Yamaguchi, S. Kuma, T. Azuma, “Status of the Laser Spectroscopy and Merged-beam Experiments at RICE,” JPS Conf. Proc., in press (2019).