Extracting partial decay rates of helium from complex rotation: autoionizing resonances of the one-dimensional configurations

Abstract

Partial autoionization rates of doubly excited one-dimensional helium in the collinear Zee and eZe configuration are obtained by means of the complex rotation method. The approach presented here relies on a projection of back-rotated resonance wave functions onto singly ionized channel wave functions and the computation of the corresponding particle fluxes. In spite of the long-range nature of the Coulomb potential between the electrons and the nucleus, an asymptotic region where the fluxes are stationary is clearly observed. Low-lying doubly excited states are found to decay predomintantly into the nearest single-ionization continuum. This approach paves the way for a systematic analysis of the decay rates observed in higher-dimensional models, and of the role of electronic correlations and atomic structure in recent photoionization experiments.