Wochenübersicht

Molecular hydrogen ions (MHI), the simplest molecules, are three-body quantum systems composed of two simple nuclei and one electron. They are of high interest for fundamental physics and metrology because they provide the missing link between the fields of mass and g-factor measurements with Penning traps and spectroscopy of hydrogen-like atoms. Basically, the new ingredients introduced by the MHI are the long-range nucleus-nucleus interaction, absent in the hydrogen atom, and the quantized motion of the nuclei. Precision spectroscopy of the MHI can thus furnish novel results: (1) on the masses of proton and deuteron (in the future, also of tritium), (2) set limits for beyond-Standard-Model (BSM) forces, (3) verify the wave character of matter, and (4) test alternative theories of quantum mechanics. This is performed by comparing or matching experimental and theoretical rotational and/or vibrational frequencies. The comparison is enhanced by the availability of several recently measured transition frequencies and recent advances in ab initio theory. An additional opportunity for probing the interactions between the particles within the MHI is the precision measurement of its hyperfine structure (HFS). Only the synthesis of the HFS of the hydrogen atom, of the deuterium atom and of the molecular hydrogen ion allows probing the physics of HFS at the finest level, resolving the issue of the uncalculable nuclear contributions. We present recent results of our spectroscopy of sympathetically cooled MHI, its results and interpretation. An outlook on near-future studies is also given.

Conventional chemistry deals with reactants that lead to stable molecules following a classical equilibration pathway. The same holds for classical self-assembly processes, in which non-covalent interactions lead to assembly according to thermal equilibration. There are also a number of systems that reach a metastable state momentarily, and subsequently jump to another lower energy state. In supramolecular systems, this is called pathway complexity. The propensity to transition from a metastable state to an equilibrium state is a function of the energy barrier with respect to thermal energy. This is fundamentally different from the far-from-equilibrium way living systems work, which can be achieved by employing a ‘fuel’ which drives a system to a high energy state and coupling it with an environment which can bring the system back to the original state. Keys to non-equilibrium behaviour are the mechanisms through which systems are able to extract energy from the chemical reactants (‘fuel’) that drive such processes. In our group, a fuel driven enzyme mediated reaction network was established where a ligation reaction occurs followed by a dynamic steady state, whose lifetime depends on the fuel concentration and dynamics is decided by the ratio of the ligation and restriction enzymes, and finally the restriction process dominates giving back the monomers. This is achieved in our case by using ATP as a fuel which activates a ligation enzyme leading to formation of DNA polymers which get cleaved by the restriction enzyme giving back the monomers. By tuning the interactions between these polymers, one can give rise to multivalent DNA coacervates which phase separate as a function of time and eventually vanish when the restriction step dominates. This liquid liquid phase separation (LLPS) process is fundamentally different from conventional coacervation in that it occurs as a result of interaction between polymers which are at a very high energy as opposed to thermodynamically stable phase separation. In this talk I will talk about trapping such a reaction module inside a ‘protocell’ which is a simple mimic of a real cell and explore the possibility of making a synthetic cell bottom up inside which transient LLPS might occur. For this project, we are using liposomes as cell mimics as the phospholipid bilayer which they contain closely resembles a cell.