Keywords

Dissociation, Ion recombination, Ions, Molecular structure, Symmetry (Physics)

Abstract

We discuss the role of symmetries in the dissociative recombinations (DR) of three polyatomic ions, namely the linear HCO+ (formyl) ion and the two highly symmetric H+3 and H3O+ (hydronium) molecular ions. Regarding the HCO+ ion, we apply a quantum mechanical treatment using the Multi-channel Quantum Defect Theory (MQDT) formalism to describe the ion-electron scattering process. Our study takes into account the Renner-Teller effect in order to model the non Born-Oppenheimer vibronic coupling in linear polyatomic ions. The coupling has shown to represent the main mechanism responsible for electronic capturing in highly excited Rydberg states associated with excited vibrational levels of the ionic core. We consider all internal degrees of freedom of HCO+ and obtain the dissociative cross section as a function of the incident electron kinetic energy. We have also improved the theoretical approach by including the large permanent dipole moment of HCO+ using a generalization of the MQDT formalism. To our knowledge, this is the rst time the permanent dipole moment of an ion is included in a DR study. The obtained results are in good agreement with experimental data. We also study the DR of H+3 and H3O+ symmetric ions using a simpli ed theoretical treatment, which focuses on the key ingredient of the DR process, the electron capture in the rst excited degenerate vibrational normal mode of the ions through non Born-Oppenheimer Jahn-Teller coupling. For both ions the obtained cross sections are in very good agreement with the available experimental data. Moreover, in the case of H+3 , the results reproduce previous calculations from two independent theoretical studies. Finally, we investigate the role of symmetries in few body ultra-cold collisions by considering both three and four identical atoms systems. We derive allowed rearrangements of different fragments of the system, satisfying the complete symmetry of the molecular Hamiltonian. For that purpose we establish a correspondence between constants of motion of the system in di erent large-distance con gurations and irreducible representations of the total symmetry group. Selection rules (forbidden transitions) and allowed states, which depend on the fermionic or bosonic nature of the atoms, can be derived from these results.

Notes

If this is your thesis or dissertation, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu

Graduation Date

2010

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Kokoouline, Viatcheslav

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Physics

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0003552

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0003552

Language

English

Release Date

December 2013

Length of Campus-only Access

3 years

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences, Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

Download

Included in

Physics Commons

Share

COinS