Oxygen (O2) is one of the most important elements required to sustain life. The concentration of O2 on Earth has been accumulated over millions of years and has a direct connection with that of CO2. Further, CO2 plays an important role in many other planetary atmospheres. Therefore, molecular reactions involving CO2 are critical for studying the atmospheres of such planets. Existing studies on the dissociation of CO2 are exclusively focused on the C--O bond breakage. Here we report first experiments on the direct observation of molecular Oxygen formation from CO2 in strong laser fields with a reaction microscope. Our accompanying simulations suggest that CO2 molecules may undergo bending motion during and after strong-field ionization which supports the molecular Oxygen formation process. The observation of the molecular Oxygen formation from CO2 may trigger further experimental and theoretical studies on such processes with laser pulses, and provide hints in studies of the O2 and CO2+ abundance in CO2-dominated planetary atmospheres.
@article{arxiv.1604.07582,
title = {Direct Observation of Molecular Oxygen Production from Carbon Dioxide},
author = {Seyedreza Larimian and Sonia Erattupuzha and Sebastian Mai and Philipp Marquetand and Leticia González and Andrius Baltuška and Markus Kitzler and Xinhua Xie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.07582},
year = {2017}
}