Rydberg Tagging of Spin-Polarized Hydrogen Atoms

Bernadette Broderick (1) , Michael B Doyle (1) , Baptiste Joalland (1) , Arghya Dey (1) , Oleg Vasyutinskii (2) , Arthur G. Suits (1)

1 Wayne State University [Detroit]
2 A.F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute

While the production of spin-polarized hydrogen atoms in photodissociation was predicted over thirty years ago, schemes to quantify it have proved elusive with only a few examples in the literature. The most important experimental difficulty is to resolve the fine structure splitting in the H atom 2p level that is generally far smaller than the associated Doppler width of any transition of interest. Here we show a novel methodology for direct detection of spin-polarized hydrogen atoms with high velocity resolution, which is achieved by a simple modification of the widely used Hydrogen Rydberg time-of-flight technique. This provides a general probe of multi-surface nonadiabatic dynamics, sensitive to coherent effects in dissociation along multiple paths, and applicable to a wide range of polyatomic systems.

Domaines: Physique [physics]; Chimie

Bernadette Broderick, Michael B Doyle, Baptiste Joalland, Arghya Dey, Oleg Vasyutinskii, et al.. Rydberg Tagging of Spin-Polarized Hydrogen Atoms. Atomic and Molecular Interactions, Gordon Research Conference, Jul 2012, Stonehill College, MA, United States. ⟨hal-01246954⟩