Vacancy decay in endohedral atoms

Abstract

It is demonstrated that the fullerene shell affects dramatically the radiative and Auger vacancy decay of an endohedral atom A@C60. The collectivized electrons of the C60 shell add new possibilities for radiative and non-radiative decays similar to that in ordinary atoms where initial and final state vacancies almost always belong to different subshells. It is shown that the smallness of the atomic shell radii as compared to that of the fullerenes shell provides an opportunity to derive the simple formulas for the probabilities of the electron transitions. It is shown that the radiative and Auger (or Koster-Kronig) widths of a vacancy decay due to electron transition in the atom A in A@C60 acquire an additional factors that can be expressed via the polarizability of the C60 at transition energy. It is demonstrated that due to opening of the non-radiative decay channel for vacancies in subvalent subshells the decay probability increases by five -- six orders of magnitude.