Dr Peter J. M. Van Der Burgt

Biography

Ph.D. in Physics (1986), University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Research Associate and Visiting Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina (1986-1988). Research Associate at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada (1989-1993). Guest Researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland (1988). Visiting Researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (2003). Senior Lecturer in Experimental Physics at NUI Maynooth (1993-present).

Research Interest

This research project studies electron and photon impact fragmentation of molecules and clusters that are of interest to radiation damage studies, plasma physics, atmospheric physics and other fields. The experiment consists of a differentially pumped vacuum system, with an expansion chamber to generate a pulsed supersonic beam of molecules or clusters, and a collision chamber where the molecules or clusters are fragmented using a pulsed electron or laser beam. A reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometer with a microchannel plate detector is used for the mass-resolved detection of ions. Neutral atoms, radicals and cluster fragments in metastable or high-lying Rydberg states (E* > 8 eV, t > 1 ms) are detected using a channeltron. The current focus is on electron impact fragmentation of biomolecules such as the DNA bases, and on generating beams of water clusters containing biomolecules and relevant atmospheric species.