Fragmentation processes of the core-excited NO molecule

Abstract

Ionization and fragmentation processes of the NO molecule following the excitation of the nitrogen 1s electron have been studied by means of high-resolution mass-selective ionyield measurements. The yields of N + , O + and NO + ions acquired with a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS) and a linear time-of-flight spectrometer (TOF) show surprising differences at the N(1s −1 ) threshold region suggesting the selective attachment of the excited core electron to the N + centre during the dissociation of the NO + ion. The fragmentation branching ratios corrected for the angular and kinetic energy effects are presented. The kinetic energy distributions of the N + and O + fragments have been extracted for a number of Rydberg states manifesting a significant dependence on l quantum number and energy of the primary excited Rydberg level. The lifetime of the core-excited N(1s −1 ) state has been found from the shape of the low kinetic energy electron spectra acquired above the 1 and 3 thresholds.

Photofragmentation study of core-excited NO

“…The spectra were scaled to one another by normalizing them at 430 eV to the branching ratios in table 1 (TIY is 100 at this point). Branching ratios in table 1 include valence ionization contribution and then differ from the branching ratios reported in [14]. Both N +++ and O +++ fragments have very weak intensities and were not detected above background levels in the TOF experiments, so their spectra were normalized by comparing counting rates to the N ++ rate.…”

Fragmentation dynamics of diatomic molecules under proton impact: Kinetic energy release spectra of CO^{q+} and NO^{q+} (q = 2, 3) molecular ions

“…The electronic states and corresponding PECs for neutral, singly ionized and doubly ionized diatoms are readily available in literature [15][16][17][18][19], however, such calculations for multiply charged molecular ions are rather lim-ited [20][21][22]. For example, there are very few reports on the fragmentation dynamics of N O molecule [23][24][25][26] and the PEC calculations are available only up to doubly charged (N O 2+ ) molecular ions [19,23,27].…”

Strong interference effects in the angularly resolved Auger decay and fluorescence emission spectra of the core-excited NO molecule

“…The decay of the core-excited N * O and NO * resonances has already been studied by photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) [10,11,12,13], vibrationally resolved constant ionic state spectroscopy (CIS) [14,15], mass-selective ion-yield (photofragmentation) spectroscopy [16,17], and photon-induced fluorescence spectroscopy (PIFS) [18,19].…”