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Abstract

The course of experiments reported in this work is dedicated to give insight into the collision dynamics between electrons and small rare gas clusters. Kinematically complete (e, 2e) experiments were performed for the ionization of argon dimers and small argon clusters with 100 eV impact energy. Compared to parallel measured data for atomic argon, the cross-sections reveal a significant probability of additional elastic scattering processes for increasing target size. In a second experiment 61 eV electrons were used to ionize neon dimers. The obtained triple-differential cross-sections show distinct differences in form of lobes that are not observed for the simultaneously obtained atomic cross-sections. These give first indications for the influence of molecular orbitals symmetries in the ionization process in dimers. Furthermore, the dissociation of argon dimers into two charged fragments was studied by 120 eV electrons. The fragmentation into two singly-charged ions reveals two different pathways: one by sequential ionization, the other by double ionization of one constituent and a subsequent radiative decay process. The triply-charge final state, could be assigned to interatomic coulombic decay, an ultra-fast process closely related to the Auger decay. For all studied channels angular distributions of the ionic fragments as well as for the emitted electrons are presented.