Among the more important of the numerous technological applications of titanium dioxide is its use as a photocatalyst to degrade organic pollutants or to perform other useful chemical transformations. The photocatalytic role of TiO2 could be greatly enhanced if a particular isomer that more effectively absorb the solar radiation at the Earth’s surface could be identified and synthesized. There has been an intense effort to measure and predict the electronic state distribution and other properties of the monomer and small clusters of TiO2 and to correlate the determined properties with those of the bulk material. Here we describe the results of experimental studies that characterize the electronic and geometric structure of gas-phase isovalent series TiO2[1], ZrO2, and HfO2.
Late metal containing polar diatomic molecules are the current most attractive venues for testing parity nonconservation (PNC) via either the determination of the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron, de. The metastable H31 state of thallium monoxide, ThO is proposed[2] to be the most favorable case because the strongly polarized s-p hybrid orbital of the unpaired electrons leads to enormous internal electric fields ( 30 GV/cm) along the internuclear axis. The proposed measurements require that the permanent electric dipole moment be significant. Here we report[3] on the determination of the permanent electric dipole moment of ThO and other properties using molecular beam optical spectroscopy.