Abstract
We acknowledge support from the European Research Council under ERC Grants No. 637756 STARLIGHT, No. 227355 ELYCHE, and No. 290853 XCHEM, from LASERLAB-EUROPE (Grant Agreement No. 284464, EC’s Seventh Framework Programme), from European COST Action CM1204 XLIC, the MICINN Project FIS2013-42002-R, the ERA-Chemistry Project PIM2010EEC-00751, the European Grant MC-ITN CORINF. Calculations were performed at the Centro de Computacion of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (CC-UAM) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). G. S. acknowledges the Italian Ministry of Research Project FIRB No. RBID08CRXK. R. L. and M. H. acknowledge a Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme Fellowship (Grant Agreement No. PIRSES-GA-2012-31754, EC’s Seventh Framework Programme) and the COST Action CM1405 MOLIM. C. L. acknowledges National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 11127901, No. 61221064, and No. 11404356), 973 Project (Grant No. 2011CB808103). We are very grateful to Alicia Palacios for fruitful discussions on the ionization model
Highlights
Molecular nitrogen is the most abundant species in Earth’s atmosphere and is one of the major constituents of the upper atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and its moon Titan [1]
We show that the time versus energy dependence of this oscillatory pattern carries the signature of the potential energy curves (PECs) associated with the N2þ excited states created by the XUV pulse, providing a direct mapping of the molecular dissociation dynamics and a crucial benchmark for theory
Can be observed in the kinetic energy spectrum: the former can be associated with direct dissociation from the F2Σg state [14,23], while the latter can be assigned to dissociation from a manifold of excited states of N2þ including the 32Σg state
Summary
Molecular nitrogen is the most abundant species in Earth’s atmosphere and is one of the major constituents of the upper atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and its moon Titan [1]. In Earth’s upper atmosphere the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectral region of solar radiation is mostly attenuated by the presence of N2 [5], which absorbs the XUV. Radiation and inevitably leads to ionization and dissociation of the molecule via adiabatic and nonadiabatic relaxation of highly excited electronic states. The experimental study of the N2þ ultrafast relaxation dynamics from excited states is not trivial and its theoretical description is challenging due to the important role of electronic correlations in such excited multielectron states. This is a common feature for most many-electron diatomic and polyatomic molecules
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