Excitation and characterization of long-lived hydrogenic Rydberg states of nitric oxide

Abstract

High Rydberg states of nitric oxide (NO) with principal quantum numbers between 40 and 100 and lifetimes in excess of 10 $\mu$s have been prepared by resonance enhanced two-color two-photon laser excitation from the X ${}^2{\Pi }_{1/2}$ ground state through the A ${}^2{\Sigma }^{+}$ intermediate state. Molecules in these long-lived Rydberg states were detected and characterized 126 $\mu$s after laser photoexcitation by state-selective pulsed electric field ionization. The laser excitation and electric field ionization data were combined to construct two-dimensional spectral maps. These maps were used to identify the rotational states of the NO${}^{+}$ ion core to which the observed series of long-lived hydrogenic Rydberg states converge. The results presented pave the way for Rydberg-Stark deceleration and electrostatic trapping experiments with NO, which are expected to shed further light on the decay dynamics of these long-lived excited states, and are of interest for studies of ion-molecule reactions at low temperatures.

12 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Evolution from a molecular Rydberg gas to an ultracold plasma in a seeded supersonic expansion of NO
• Benchmarking theory with an improved measurement of the ionization and dissociation energies of H${}_2$
• Observation of enhanced rate coefficients in the H${}_2^{+}$ + H${}_2$ $\to$ H${}_3^{+}$ + H reaction at low collision energies
• Preparation of circular Rydberg states in helium using the crossed fields method
• Rydberg state ionization dynamics and tunnel ionization rates in strong electric fields

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A method for the variational calculation of hyperfine-resolved rovibronic spectra of diatomic molecules
• Slow decay processes of electrostatically trapped Rydberg NO molecules
• Electrostatic trapping of N${}_2$ molecules in high Rydberg states
• The Stark effect in molecular Rydberg states: Calculation of Rydberg-Stark manifolds of H${}_2$ and D${}_2$ including fine and hyperfine structures