DISSOCIATIVE EXCITATION OF CO2 BY ELECTRON-IMPACT - TRANSLATIONAL SPECTROSCOPY OF O-STAR STAR FRAGMENTS

Highly excited Rydberg (HR) oxygen atoms produced in electron impact dissociative excitation of CO2 are studied by time-of-flight (TOF) spectroscopy. The detector is highly discriminatory against non-HR metastable species. Fragment translational kinetic energy distributions, obtained from the TOF distributions, and excitation functions are used to investigate the dissociation channels between projectile energies of 19 and 56 eV. The dissociation processes can be divided into two groups: low energy processes having onset energies between 19 and 30 eV characterized by two-body dissociations from parent molecules with singly ionized cores and high energy processes having onset energies between 40 and 50 eV characterized by two- or three-body dissociations from parent molecules with singly or doubly ionized cores. © 1979 American Institute of Physics.