Doppler interference in dissociative resonant photoemission

Abstract

Resonant photoemission involving dissociative core excited states has been the subject of a great number of experimental and theoretical investigations in recent time. The resonant decay of such dissociating systems has been shown to lead to semiatomic Auger electron emission spectra, with particular angular behavior. In the present paper a detailed theoretical analysis of dissociative resonant photoemission spectra of homonuclear diatomic molecules is presented. The theory addresses both fixed in space and randomly oriented homonuclear molecules and emphasizes the Doppler effect and the role of the interference between channels referring to the Doppler split atomic fragments. It is shown that peaks originating from decay in the atomic fragments can be asymmetric and structured due to the Doppler interference effect. The predicted strong non-Lorentzian behavior of the substructure on the top of the Doppler broadened atomiclike contribution is traced to the interplay between decay channels leading to gerade and ungerade final states. Simulations based on wave-packet theory are compared with experimental data for molecular oxygen. Our numerical simulations of the atomiclike resonance of fixed in space molecules show that the spectral profile is very sensitive to the shape of interatomic potentials of core excited and final states. It is shown that the Doppler effect in the decay spectra depends upon the symmetry of the core excited state.