Physical Review Letters (PRL) is considered to be the leading scientific journal in physics publishing basic research articles of fundamental and widespread interest. This unique position of PRL among physics journals is reflected by the high impact factor of it, 7.621 for 2010. In the January 13, 2012 issue of PRL (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2012, 108, 023002) appeared a paper co-authored by two researchers of our institute, Tamás Szidarovszky (PhD student) and Professor Attila G. Császár (Head of the Department of Physical Chemistry and the Laboratory of Molecular Structure and Dynamics).

The title of the paper reporting results from a joint experimental and computational work is “Precision Measurements and Computations of Transition Energies in Rotationally Cold Triatomic Hydrogen Ions up to the Midvisible Spectral Range”. The theoretical techniques employed come from the fourth age of quantum chemistry (Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2012, 14(3), 1085-1106) and they allowed an order of magnitude improvement over previous efforts to compute the highly excited rotational-vibrational states of the H3+ molecular ion. The H3+ ion has a fundamental role in the astronomy and chemistry of interstellar space (it provides one of the driving forces for many of the reactions leading to the great variety of chemical species present in the cosmos). This is the first article from the international team assembled to study the structure and dynamics of the H3+ molecular ion. The team, consisting of leading researchers from the UK, US, France, Germany, Russia, and Hungary, plans to continue their efforts to observe and fully understand the chemistry of the H3+ molecular ion. These efforts may finally lead to a mechanistic understanding of the Carrington-Kennedy experiments and bands, constituting one of the important unsolved problems of molecular physics and chemistry.