Imaging spectroscopy of recombination fragments of

Abstract

Dissociative recombination of vibrationally cold has been studied at the ion storage ring CRYRING, with an accurate measurement of the kinetic energy of the recombination fragments. When the incident electron energy exceeds , fragments are observed with a kinetic energy of only . The energetics suggest that this low-energy channel derives from either recombination of the state or recombination of the metastable state. High-quality ab initio calculations have been used to obtain the state vibrational relaxation time (10 ms), excitation energy (2.25 eV) and radiative lifetime (0.030 s). The dissociative recombination cross section has been obtained in a model calculation. The results imply that the state has too small a recombination cross section and too short a radiative lifetime to explain the experimental results, which were obtained after 15 s of storage in CRYRING. We conclude that the 120 meV channel is due to recombination of into the asymptotic limit. Possible mechanisms are discussed.