Eur. Phys. J. D (2016) 70: 134
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2016-70180-y

Regular Article

Negative ion resonances in carbon monoxide^*

Probing dissociative electron attachment in CO by velocity slice imaging

¹ Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, 400005 Mumbai, India
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

^a e-mail: ekkumar@tifr.res.in

Received: 9 March 2016
Received in final form: 4 May 2016
Published online: 14 June 2016

Abstract

Dissociative electron attachment to CO leading to the formation of O⁻ is studied using the velocity slice imaging technique. The angular distributions we obtained for the C(³P) and the C(¹D) limits are found to be considerably different from a recent set of measurements [Tian et al., Phys. Rev. A 88, 012708 (2013); Wang et al., J. Chem. Phys. 143, 066101 (2015)] using a similar technique. The analysis of our results indicate incoherent contributions from states of Σ and Π symmetries to both these dissociation channels and rules out the need to invoke coherent excitation of several resonances, in contrast to what has been done in the above publications. We try to correlate these resonances to those observed in inelastic scattering and transmission experiments. We also confirm the presence of a third dissociation channel leading to C(¹S) limit.