A phenomenological prologue

Resonances exist below as well as above the barrier. Their width usually increases with energy, i.e., with increasing excitation of the dissociation mode.t 

Resonances are common and unique features of elastic and inelastic collisions, photodissociation, unimolecular decay, autoionization problems, and related topics. Their general behavior and formal description are rather universal and identical for nuclear, electronic, atomic, or molecular scattering. Truhlar (1984) contains many examples of resonances in various fields of atomic and molecular physics. Resonances are particularly interesting if more than one degree of freedom is involved they reflect the quasi-bound states of the Hamiltonian and reveal a great deal of information about the multi-dimensional PES, the internal energy transfer, and the decay mechanism. A quantitative analysis based on time-dependent perturbation theory follows in the next section. 

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