Dresden 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 26: Poster III

A 26.10: Poster

Donnerstag, 17. März 2011, 16:00–18:30, P2

Coulomb explosion of diatomic molecular clusters — •Alexey Mikaberidze, Ulf Saalmann, and Jan Michael Rost — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

If a cluster is fully stripped of its electrons, the ions find themselves in a strongly repulsive potential energy landscape and rapidly undergo Coulomb explosion. The full ionization of a cluster can be achieved in a few femtoseconds by applying an intense near infrared or x-ray laser pulse.

We find using classical molecular dynamics calculations that clusters of diatomic molecules explode in a manner significantly different from atomic clusters. Moreover, it makes a difference whether the molecules in the cluster are oriented randomly or aligned. These differences manifest in the final kinetic energy distributions of ions, which can be measured experimentally. Understanding the underlying mechanisms is interesting in the context of Coulomb explosion imaging and laser-induced ion acceleration.