We report on experimental results obtained from collisions of slow highly charged Ar9+ ions with a carbon monoxide dimer (CO)2 target. A COLTRIMS setup and a Coulomb explosion imaging approach are used to reconstruct the structure of the CO dimers. The three dimensional structure is deduced from the 2-body and 3-body dissociation channels from which both the intermolecular bond length and the relative orientation of the two molecules are determined. For the 3-body channels, the experimental data are interpreted with the help of a classical model in which the trajectories of the three emitted fragments are numerically integrated. We measured the equilibrium intermolecular distance to be Re = 4.2 A. The orientation of both CO molecules with respect to the dimer axis is found to be quasi-isotropic due to the large vibrational temperature of the gas jet.
@article{arxiv.2104.14419,
title = {Coulomb explosion imaging of carbon monoxide dimers},
author = {A. Méry and V. Kumar and X. Fléchard and B. Gervais and S. Guillous and M. Lalande and J. Rangama and W. Wolff and A. Cassimi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.14419},
year = {2021}
}