Two Challenges for Experimenters

Abstract

In recent years, several theoretical studies have indicated potentially interesting, even perhaps surprising phenomena that could be observed by experimentbut have not yet been studied in the laboratory. Here we give the background and motivation for two of these, with the admitted goal of stimulating those experimental studies. The two topics: (1) the production and study of amorphous alkali metal halide clusters; (2) Penning detachment, the analogue of the well-studied Penning ionization, but in which an electron is detached from a negative ion, rather than from a neutral atom, by energy transfer in collision with an excited atom. The latter phenomenon could be particularly relevant for stellar atmospheres where negative ions are abundant. In each case, we indicate the implications and potential of having substantive experimental information about each, in effect explaining the motivation to carry out the experiments.