Formation of singly ionized oxygen atoms from O$_2$ driven by XUV pulses: a toolkit for the break-up of FEL-driven diatomics

Abstract

We formulate a general hybrid quantum-classical technique to describe the interaction of diatomic molecules with XUV pulses. We demonstrate the accuracy of our model in the context of the interaction of the O$_2$ molecule with an XUV pulse with photon energy ranging from 20 eV to 42 eV. We account for the electronic structure and electron ionization quantum mechanically employing accurate molecular continuum wavefunctions. We account for the motion of the nuclei using classical equations of motion. However, the force of the nuclei is computed by obtaining accurate potential-energy curves of O$_2$ up to O$_2^{2+}$, relevant to the 20 eV-42 eV photon-energy range, using advanced quantum-chemistry techniques. We find the dissociation limits of these states and the resulting atomic fragments and employ the Velocity Verlet algorithm to compute the velocities of these fragments. We incorporate both electron ionization and nuclear motion in a stochastic Monte-Carlo simulation and identify the ionization and dissociation pathways when O$_2$ interacts with an XUV pulse. Focusing on the O$^+$ + O$^+$ dissociation pathway, we obtain the kinetic-energy release distributions of the atomic fragments and find very good agreement with experimental results. Also, we explain the main features of the KER in terms of ionization sequences consisting of two sequential single-photon absorptions resulting in different O$^+$ and O$^{2+}$ electronic state configurations involved in the two transitions.