TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bouakline, Foudhil
A1  - Saalfrank, Peter
T1  - Seemingly asymmetric atom-localized electronic densities following laser-dissociation of homonuclear diatomics
T2  - The journal of chemical physics : bridges a gap between journals of physics and journals of chemistry
N2  - Recent experiments on laser-dissociation of aligned homonuclear diatomic molecules show an asymmetric forward-backward (spatial) electron-localization along the laser polarization axis. Most theoretical models attribute this asymmetry to interference effects between gerade and ungerade vibronic states. Presumably due to alignment, these models neglect molecular rotations and hence infer an asymmetric (post-dissociation) charge distribution over the two identical nuclei. In this paper, we question the equivalence that is made between spatial electron-localization, observed in experiments, and atomic electron-localization, alluded by these theoretical models. We show that (seeming) agreement between these models and experiments is due to an unfortunate omission of nuclear permutation symmetry, i.e., quantum statistics. Enforcement of the latter requires mandatory inclusion of the molecular rotational degree of freedom, even for perfectly aligned molecules. Unlike previous interpretations, we ascribe spatial electron-localization to the laser creation of a rovibronic wavepacket that involves field-free molecular eigenstates with opposite space-inversion symmetry i.e., even and odd parity. Space-inversion symmetry breaking would then lead to an asymmetric distribution of the (space-fixed) electronic density over the forward and backward hemisphere. However, owing to the simultaneous coexistence of two indistinguishable molecular orientational isomers, our analytical and computational results show that the post-dissociation electronic density along a specified space-fixed axis is equally shared between the two identical nuclei-a result that is in perfect accordance with the principle of the indistinguishability of identical particles. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/57184
SN  - 0021-9606
SN  - 1089-7690
VL  - 154
IS  - 23
PB  - American Institute of Physics
CY  - Melville
ER  -