Pascal Honvault, Professor UFC (Besançon), and Grégoire Guillon, Assistant Professor uB (Dijon), both members of the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Carnot de Bourgogne-ICB in the SMPCA group, had their work on strastopheric ozone selected as a CNRS Institut de Physique editorial choice. They have highlighted a strong quantum effect due to the indistinguishability of the three identical 16O atoms, leading to a rate constant for the O + O2 collision process of more than 1 order of magnitude larger than when this effect is ignored.
See also : http://www.cnrs.fr/inp/spip.php?article3617
The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters published an article on this topic: T. Rajagopala Rao, G. Guillon, S. Mahapatra, P. Honvault, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 6, 633-636 (2015).
Prominent forward scattering for the O + O2 process
Pascal Honvault started his PhD studies under the supervision of R. McCarroll in 1992 in Paris 6 (Pierre et Marie Curie University) focusing on the charge transfer in astrophysical plasmas. He was accepted at Rennes 1 in September 1996 as a MCF (assistant professor). His research then moved into the area of quantum reaction dynamics. In 2005, at the age of 36, he was accepted as a full professor at the University of Franche-Comté (Besançon). His research was conducted at the UTINAM institute in Besançon and he joined the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Carnot de Bourgogne – ICB in January 2012. He has a large number of national and international collaborations and is now recognized internationally for his work on molecular reaction dynamics at low temperatures using time independent quantum mechanical approaches.
Grégoire Guillon studied theoretical chemistry in Bordeaux University, where he got his PhD in 2009 at the Institut des Sciences Moléculaires, under the supervision of T. Stoecklin. After two post-docs in the groups of A. Viel at the Institut de Physique de Rennes and then of P.N. Roy and R.J. Le Roy in the University of Waterloo (Canada). He was appointed in 2013 as Maître de Conférences at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon. His domains of expertise are quantum reaction scattering and quantum molecular simulations.
Collaborators of the work on ozone: from left to right, P. Honvault, G. Guillon, and their colleagues from the University of Hyderabad (India), S. Mahapatra and T.R. Rao.
Prominent forward scattering for the O + O2 process - More items from the Field#1 :
