Imaging of the structure of the argon and neon dimer, trimer, and tetramer.

ABSTRACT

We Coulomb explode argon and neon dimers, trimers, and tetramers by multiple ionization in an ultrashort 800 nm laser pulse. By measuring all momentum vectors of the singly charged ions in coincidence, we determine the ground state nuclear wave function of the dimer, trimer, and tetramer. Furthermore we retrieve the bond angles of the trimer in position space by applying a classical numerical simulation. For the argon and neon trimer, we find a structure close to the equilateral triangle. The width of the distribution around the equilateral triangle is considerably wider for neon than for argon.