Electronic ground state of Ni${}_2^{+}$

Abstract

The ${}^4{\Phi }_{9/2}$ ground state of the Ni${}_2^{+}$ diatomic molecular cation is determined experimentally from temperature and magnetic-field-dependent x-ray magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy in a cryogenic ion trap, where an electronic and rotational temperature of $7.4\pm 0.2$ K was reached by buffer gas cooling of the molecular ion. The contribution of the magnetic dipole term to the x-ray magnetic circular dichroism spin sum rule amounts to $7T_z=0.17\pm 0.06$ ${\mu }_B$ per atom, approximately 11 % of the spin magnetic moment. We find that, in general, homonuclear diatomic molecular cations of $3d$ transition metals seem to adopt maximum spin magnetic moments in their electronic ground states.

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. The following article appeared in V. Zamudio-Bayer et al., J. Chem. Phys. 145, 194302 (2016) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4967821