Two-photon dissociation of vibrationally excited H2+. Complex quasi-vibrational energy and inhomogeneous differential equation approaches

We present two practical theoretical methods — the complex quasi-vibrational energy and the inhomogeneous differential equation approaches — for numerical computation of multiphoton dissociation cross sections. The methods are applied to the study of the two-photon dissociation of H₂⁺ (1sσg). The cross sections are small for low-lying vibrational states but increase very rapidly with increasing vibrational quantum number, suggesting that experimentally accessible powerful lasers can be used to probe the highly excited vibrational states of the ground electronic state of a homonuclear diatomic molecule.