Special Issue Preface pubs.acs.org/JPCC
Introduction of Ron Naaman his special issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry C honors Professor Ron Naaman, the Aryeh and Mintzi Katzman Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Ron has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of molecular physics and the quantum nature of matter through the creative design of experiments that address fundamental physical questions about molecules and molecular assemblies. We are grateful to the editors and staff of the Journal and to all of the contributors to this special issue for making it possible to recognize Ron in this way. Ron’s spirit and approach to science first became apparent in the 1970s when he began discovering and using new methods to understand molecular structure and properties. Ron contributed substantially to the development of new laserbased methods for performing spectroscopy and for the analysis of gases and gaseous clusters. After arriving at the Weizmann and well into the 1990s, Ron collaborated with Prof. Zeev Vager on developing the ‘Coulomb explosion’ method, in which a molecular ion is rapidly (