Electron collisions and internal excitation in stored molecular ion beams

Abstract

In storage ring experiments the role, which the initial internal excitation of a molecular ion can play in electron collisions, and the effect of these collisions on the internal excitation are investigated. Dissociative recombination (DR) and inelastic and super-elastic collisions are studied in the system of He2+. The DR rate coefficient at low energies depends strongly on the initial vibrational excitation in this system. Therefore changes in the DR rate coefficient are a very sensitive probe for changes in the vibrational excitation in He2+, which is used to investigate the effects of collisions with electrons and residual gas species. The low-energy DR of HD+ is rich with resonances from the indirect DR process, when certain initial rotational levels in the molecular ion are coupled to levels in neutral Rydberg states lying below the ion state. Using new procedures for high-resolution electron-ion collision spectroscopy developed here, these resonances in the DR cross section can be measured with high energy sensitivity. This allows a detailed comparison with results of a MQDT calculation in an effort to assign some or all of the resonances to certain intermediate Rydberg levels.