Towards a theory of dissociative recombination

Current experiments in storage rings at Aarhus and Stockholm reveal that ions such as CH ₃ ⁺ , OH ₃ ⁺ , OH ₂ ⁺ and CH ₅ ⁺ recombine and fragment into three parts more often than into just two. Analysis of the possible resonances between free electron and bound electron states for the ions require a detailed examination of the correlation effects as well as the coupling to nuclear degrees of freedom. The problem is well suited for the propagator approach. An analysis of the structure of the self-energy kernel shows the presence of possible resonances with degenerate electronic states which are unstable according to the Jahn-Teller theorem and provides channels for multiple fragmentation.