New Microwave and Optical Molecules

Abstract

This article summarizes some recent laboratory spectroscopic activities in our spectroscopy group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There are currently two main efforts here in laboratory astrophysics, one in the radio band, the other in the optical. The radio work has succeeded beyond expectations, in the last 7 years yielding the 105 new molecules in Fig. 1. Essentially all are plausible constituents of the interstellar gas or circumstellar shells, and 8, as Fig. 1 indicates, have in fact already been detected with large radio telescopes on the basis of the very precise frequencies which our spectroscopy provides. The application of Fourier-transform microwave (FTM) spectroscopy to molecules produced by a gas discharge in a supersonic beam has been crucial to many of these discoveries, which are now occurring almost weekly.