A Trans-Pacific Collaboration: Dynamical Experiments and Experiences

Abstract

I first met Soji Tsuchiya in 1979 at the XIV International Symposium on Free Radicals at the Kwansai Gakuin University in Sanda. At that time I had no idea what an enormous impact we would have on each other. In fact, Soji is almost completely absent from my memories of the meeting. My memories of that trip are dominated by my overwhelming first impressions of Japan, my first meeting with Soji’s collaborator, Katsumi Sakurai (to whom I owned my initial scientific success as a postdoc with the late H.P. Broida, but that is another story), and one incredible post-conference day in Tokyo in which David Harris and I visited both the Hongo and Komaba campuses of the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (and gave talks at two of the three universities)! I remember discussing the Tsuchiya-Sakurai plan for "cascade type excitation" with Katsumi and realizing how lucky it was for me that our essentially identical "Stimulated Emission Pumping" experiments on 12 had already begun to work. But at that time I had absolutely no interest in polyatomic molecules, especially none in IVR or chaos, and I suspect Soji and Katsumi had little or no interest in diatomic molecules. If it were not for my collaborator at MIT, Jim Kinsey, Soji Tsuchiya and I would probably not have collided so strongly and fruitfully.