Ultrafast Dynamics of the Rydberg States of CO$_{2}$: Autoionization and Dissociation Lifetimes

Abstract

We report the measurement of ultrafast relaxation dynamics of excited states of carbon dioxide molecule using time-resolved pump-probe photoelectron spectroscopy. Neutral ground state carbon dioxide is excited to $nd\sigma_g$ Henning sharp Rydberg states with an attosecond extreme ultraviolet pulse train. A time delayed near infrared probe pulse is used to photoionize these states to their corresponding ionization limit $B^2\Sigma_u^+$. We obtain differential kinetic energy spectrograms and angular distributions for photoionization and autoionization channels. We model the competition between predissociation and autoionization in the Rydberg state dynamics and analyze differential photoelectron yield as a function of the time delay to extract previously unknown autoionization and predissociation lifetimes for three Henning sharp states (n = 4, 5, 6).