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arXiv · 1601.00433

Photoassociation spectroscopy in Penning ionization reactions at sub-Kelvin temperatures

Wojciech Skomorowski·Yuval Shagam·Edvardas Narevicius·Christiane P. Koch
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Abstract

Penning ionization reactions in merged beams with precisely controlled collision energies have been shown to accurately probe quantum mechanical effects in reactive collisions. A complete microscopic understanding of the reaction is, however, faced with two major challenges---the highly excited character of the reaction's entrance channel and the limited precision of even the best state-of-the-art ab initio potential energy surfaces. Here, we suggest photoassociation spectroscopy as a tool to identify the character of orbiting resonances in the entrance channel and probe the ionization width as a function of inter-particle separation. We introduce the basic concept and discuss the general conditions under which this type of spectroscopy will be successful.

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Wojciech Skomorowski, Yuval Shagam, Edvardas Narevicius, Christiane P. Koch. 2016-01-04. Photoassociation spectroscopy in Penning ionization reactions at sub-Kelvin temperatures. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpca.5b12586

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