Experimental quantification of site-specific efficiency of Interatomic Coulombic Decay after inner shell ionization
Abstract
Energy and charge transfer processes like Interatomic Coulombic Decay (ICD) play an important role in the relaxation of excited atoms or molecules in dense media such as biological tissue. Here, we present a method to experimentally determine the site-specific efficiency of the ICD process, which is in quantitative agreement with theoretical calculations.
Interatomic Coulombic Decay (ICD) and related interatomic and intermolecular autoionization mechanisms are ubiquitous decay processes of excited atoms and molecules in an environment. It is commonly accepted that the efficiency of ICD of an ionized atom in a cluster increases with an increasing number of nearest neighbors.
Here, we present a method for experimental validation of this assumption by a site-specific and quantitative comparison of ICD and its main competitor, Auger decay, in core-level ionized Kr clusters. Our results are in quantitative agreement with scaled theoretical calculations on Kr-2.