Photoionization of the CO and NO molecules

Abstract

We present photoionization cross sections for two diatomic molecules, CO and NO, using a distorted-wave approximation. Both CO and NO are important atmospheric molecules, particularly in shock-heated atmospheres and in some astrophysical contexts. Photoionization cross sections may be used to compute the bound–free absorption contribution, which although less relevant than the bound–bound absorption that dominates in the near infra-red wavelength band, is still necessary for a complete description of molecular absorption. A configuration-average distorted-wave method is used to compute the photoionization cross sections based on earlier molecular structure tabulations. Our calculations are compared to experiment and good agreement is found at incident energies above 40 eV.