Laser photochemistry of molecular oxygen.

Molecular oxygen poses very difficult challenges in molecular photochemistry due to the extreme weakness of its ultraviolet absorption spectrum. In the past few years a new technique called velocity map imaging has been able to overcome many of the experimental obstacles to the study of this all-important atmospheric species. In this Account several aspects of laser photochemistry of O(2) will be described, including the unraveling of the Herzberg and Schumann-Runge continua using velocity map imaging.