6 research outputs found
Ultrafast interatomic electronic decay in multiply excited clusters
An ultrafast mechanism belonging to the family of interatomic Coulombic decay
(ICD) phenomena is proposed. When two excited species are present, an ultrafast
energy transfer can take place bringing one of them to its ground state and
ionizing the other one. It is shown that if large homoatomic clusters are
exposed to an ultrashort and intense laser pulse whose photon energy is in
resonance with an excitation transition of the cluster constituents, the large
majority of ions will be produced by this ICD mechanism rather than by
two-photon ionization. A related collective-ICD process that is operative in
heteroatomic systems is also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure