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Interatomic Coulombic Decay (ICD) and related interatomic and intermolecular autoionization mechanisms are ubiquitous decay processes of excited atoms and molecules in an environment. It is commonly accepted that the efficiency of ICD of an ionized atom in a cluster increases with an increasing number of nearest neighbors. Here, we present a method for experimental validation of this assumption by a site-specific and quantitative comparison of ICD and its main competitor, Auger decay, in core-level ionized Kr clusters. Our results are in quantitative agreement with scaled theoretical calculations on Kr2. Energy and charge transfer processes like Interatomic Coulombic Decay (ICD) play an important role in the relaxation of excited atoms or molecules in dense media such as biological tissue. Here, we present a method to experimentally determine the site-specific efficiency of the ICD process, which is in quantitative agreement with theoretical calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interatomic resonant Auger effect in N2O is investigated experimentally and theoretically. We observe variations of the ratio between the yields of 1s-photoionization of the central and terminal nitrogen atom in the photon energy range across the O 1s → π* excitation. The present ab initio calculations of electronic structure and dynamics attribute these variations to the Fano interference between the direct N 1s-photoionizations and the resonant O 1s → π* excitation followed by Auger decays into the respective core–shell continua. The theory reveals that this interatomic core–hole-transfer effect is governed entirely by an energy transfer mechanism, and not by charge transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the observation of the radiative decay of singly charged noble gas ground-state ions embedded in heterogeneous van der Waals clusters. Electron-photon coincidence spectroscopy and dispersed photon spectroscopy are applied to identify the radiative charge transfer from Kr atoms to a Ne2+ dimer, which forms after single valence photoionization of Ne atoms at the surface of a NeKr cluster. This mechanism might be a fundamental decay process of ionized systems in an environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]