High-Energy Molecular-Frame Photoelectron Angular Distributions: A Molecular Bond-Length Ruler
Abstract
We present an experimental and theoretical study of core-level ionization of small hetero- and homo-nuclear molecules employing circularly polarized light and address molecular-frame photoelectron angular distributions in the light's polarization plane (CP-MFPADs). We find that the main forward-scattering peaks of CP-MFPADs are slightly tilted with respect to the molecular axis. We show that this tilt angle can be directly connected to the molecular bond length by a simple, universal formula. The extraction of the bond length becomes more accurate as the photoelectron energy is increased. We apply the derived formula to several examples of CP-MFPADs of C 1s and O 1s photoelectrons of CO, which have been measured experimentally or obtained by means of ab initio modeling. The photoelectron kinetic energies range from 70 to 1000~eV and the extracted bond lengths agree well with the known bond length of the CO molecule in its ground state. In addition, we discuss the influence of the back-scattering contribution that is superimposed over the analyzed forward-scattering peak in case of homo-nuclear diatomic molecules as N.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2105.11897,
title = {High-Energy Molecular-Frame Photoelectron Angular Distributions: A Molecular Bond-Length Ruler},
author = {Isabel Vela-Peréz and Fukiko Ota and Abir Mhamdi and Yoshiaki Tamura and Jonas Rist and Niklas Melzer and Safak Uerken and Giammarco Nalin and Nils Anders and Daehyun You and Max Kircher and Christian Janke and Markus Waitz and Florian Trinter and Renaud Guillemin and Maria Novella Piancastelli and Marc Simon and Vernon T. Davis and Joshua B. Williams and Reinhard Dörner and Keisuke Hatada and Kaoru Yamazaki and Kilian Fehre and Philipp V. Demekhin and Kiyoshi Ueda and Markus S. Schöffler and Till Jahnke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.11897},
year = {2023}
}