Hannover 2013 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 20: SYCD: Interatomic and Intermolecular Coulombic Decay

MO 20.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 21, 2013, 11:00–11:30, E 415

Ultralong range ICD in the He dimer, resonant Auger - ICD cascade processes — •Till Jahnke — IKF, Goethe Universität, Max-von-Laue-Str.1, 60438 Frankfurt

Interatomic (or intermolecular) Coulombic Decay (ICD) has become an extensively studied atomic decay process during the last 10 years. The talk will show examples of different systems in which ICD has been examined. In particular helium molecules (so called helium dimers) are presented in which ICD occurs over longest internuclear distances.

In ICD electrons of low energy are created as a typical decay product. Such electrons are known to effectively cause DNA double strand breakups suggesting ICD as a possible origin for radiation damage of living tissue. The group of L. Cederbaum recently suggested that ICD can be triggered efficiently and site-selectively by resonant excitation of molecules. They realized that this provides a unique tool to create low energy electrons at a specific site inside a biological system for example in order to damage malignant cells that are tagged using specific marker molecules.

Here we show experimentally that resonant Auger induced ICD can indeed be observed in model systems of small nitrogen and carbon monoxide clusters and - as expected - produces low energy electrons. Furthermore our simple model systems are able to prove the efficiency of ICD: it occurs before the individual molecule is able to undergo dissociation, i.e on a timescale <10 fs. Our findings therefore strongly support the idea of resonant Auger-ICD being a promising process to induce radiation damage at a specific site inside a high-Z-tagged cell.