Mass-symmetry breaking in three-body ions

Abstract

The ground-state energy of three-body ions $(M^{+},M^{+},m^{-})$ evolves when the like-charge constituents are given different masses. The comparison of $(m_1^{+},m_2^{+},m^{-})$ with the average of $(m_1^{+},m_1^{+},m^{-})$ and $(m_2^{+},m_2^{+},m^{-})$ reveals a competition between the symmetric term and the antisymmetric one. The former dominates in the Born--Oppenheimer regime such as the (p,t,e) case, while the latter wins for H${}^{-}$-like systems with two negative light particles surrounding a heavy nucleus. A comparison is also made with the case of baryons in simple quark models with flavour independence.

4 pages, 3 figures

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Two-electron atoms, ions and molecules