ROTATIONAL DISTRIBUTIONS OF MOLECULAR-IONS FOLLOWING CORE EXCITATION AND DECAY

The rotational distribution in the N2+ (B) state produced by core excitation and decay is reported for three different core excitation energies. In contrast to the case of valence excitation, the rotational branching ratios do not exhibit a significant dependence on excitation energy. This similarity is attributed to the uniformly high kinetic energies of the emitted electron for the three cases and provides evidence for the production of singly charged molecular ions in the core ionization continuum through an interchannel coupling mechanism.