Spontaneous Electron Emission from Hot Silver Dimer Anions: Breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer ApproximationShow others and affiliations
Number of Authors: 112020 (English)In: Physical Review Letters, ISSN 0031-9007, E-ISSN 1079-7114, Vol. 124, no 17, article id 173001Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
We report the first experimental evidence of spontaneous electron emission from a homonuclear dimer anion through direct measurements of Ag-2(-) -> Ag-2 + e(-) decays on milliseconds and seconds timescales. This observation is very surprising as there is no avoided crossing between adiabatic energy curves to mediate such a process. The process is weak, yet dominates the decay signal after 100 ms when ensembles of internally hot Ag-2(-) ions are stored in the cryogenic ion-beam storage ring, DESIREE, for 10 s. The electron emission process is associated with an instantaneous, very large reduction of the vibrational energy of the dimer system. This represents a dramatic deviation from a Born-Oppenheimer description of dimer dynamics.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2020. Vol. 124, no 17, article id 173001
National Category
Physical Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-181806DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.173001ISI: 000528783100005PubMedID: 32412256OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-181806DiVA, id: diva2:1441066
2020-06-152020-06-152022-03-23Bibliographically approved