Molecular orientation effects angular distributions

The discovery of confinement resonances in the photoelectron angular distribution parameters from encaged atoms may shed light [36] on the origin of anomalously high values of the nondipole asymmetry parameters observed in diatomic molecules [62]. Following [36], consider photoionization of an inner subshell of the atom A in a diatomic molecule AB in the gas phase, i.e., with random orientation of the molecular axis relative to the polarization vector of the radiation. The atom B remains neutral in this process and is arbitrarily located on the sphere with its center at the nucleus of the atom A with radius equal to the interatomic distance in this molecule. To the lowest order, the effect of the atom B on the photoionization parameters can be approximated by the introduction of a spherically symmetric potential that represents the atom B smeared over... 

When adsorbed molecules are bombarded with electrons, local heating effects occur that lead to thermal desorption. In addition, there is a small but finite probability that electrons in the chemical bonds that hold the adsorbate to the surface will be excited into a repulsive state, leading to the desorption of that molecule either as a neutral species or as a molecular ion. Desorption of neutral species under electron-beam bombardment is frequently observed in studies of electron-surface interactions. A fraction of the adsorbed molecules will be ionized. These can be detected as positive ions, and the spatial distribution of this ion flux can be imaged on a fluorescent screen. Electron-stimulated desorption ion-angular distribution (ESDIAD) [56, 61, 64, 79-84] is the name of the technique that is used to learn about the site symmetry and orientation of adsorbed molecular species, since the molecular ions are usually emitted in the directions of their chemical bonds with the surface and with an unchanged orientation with respect to the orientation of the molecule when it was adsorbed on the surface. 

The main features in a normal X-ray or neutron diffraction pattern arise from inter-molecular interference, so it would be possible to determine the orientational order parameters for a distribution of local groups of molecules rather than the single molecule distribution. An early application of neutron diffraction was to find an inframolecular interference at high Q where intermolecular effects have died away. This is more practical with neutron diffraction, because the atomic form factor for X-rays also dies away at high Q. The angular distribution of such... 

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