Angular distribution of resonant Auger electrons from atoms with multiple overlapping resonances

Abstract

We study the angular distribution of resonant Auger electrons from atoms in the presence of many overlapping metastable states. We work within the one-step model of the resonant Auger process and develop a general form for the asymmetry parameters which takes into account the interactions between the bound and continuum states more completely than in previous works. We simulate the theoretical angular distributions of Auger electrons following the electronic decay of a resonantly excited system with two energetically closely spaced resonances, where the energy splitting of the states is varied. We show that when the energy splitting becomes small, the angular distributions can be affected considerably.