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Abstract
Helium nanodroplet isolation is used to facilitate the formation of van der Waals complexes in situ. Complexes are interrogated with infrared Stark, and Zeeman spectroscopies. Complexes are formed from sequential capture of gas phase transient radicals and stable species. Transient radicals in these complexes are atomic oxygen, O(3P), or the hydroxyl radical, OH. The complexes form along the ground vibronic surface and are trapped in shallow wells due to barriers for reaction. The complex formed between O(3P) and HCN is exclusively hydrogen bound despite there being a small well on the potential in which a nitrogen bound isomer could exist. The complexes formed from the hydroxyl radical are OH-CO, and OH-C2H2, which have a linear and T-shaped geometry respectively. The large amplitude zero point motion of the OH-CO complex leads to a reduction in the measured dipole moment from Stark spectroscopy. Eighty percent of the reduction can be accounted for via vibrational averaging along the large amplitude motion. Zeeman Spectroscopy of the hydroxyl radical and its complexes exhibit phenomenon not well understood. The linear OH-CO was easily modeled through a gas phase effective Hamiltonian, but both the OH radical and the OH-acetylene complex were perturbed significantly from gas phase predictions. As of yet, there is no theoretical understanding to which these perturbations can be attributed.