A new technique for measurement of subrotational lifetime of molecular ions.

Singly and multiply charged molecular ions are found in diverse environments and hold relevance for a wide range of research areas like combustion chemistry, accelerator physics, atmospheric sciences, plasma physics, astrophysics etc. Molecular dications are of special significance as they can be generated and studied comparatively easily in laboratory experiments. And they have enabled exploration of new and exciting phenomenon such as hydrogen migration, inter-atomic Coulombic decay, plasmonic excitations, orbital tomography etc.

Three-body dissociation of OCS: Separating sequential and concerted pathways.

Events from the sequential and concerted modes of the fragmentation of OCS that result in coincident detection of fragments C, O, and S have been separated using a newly proposed representation. An ion beam of 1.8 MeV Xe is used to make the triply charged molecular ion, with the fragments being detected by a recoil ion momentum spectrometer.