Nonthermal power law decay of metal dimer anions

The metastable decay of dimer anions of Cu and Ag has been measured in a storage ring. The decay is found to proceed nonexponentially and is well described by a power law with an exponent of -1. This signals the presence of a continuum of decay constants in the ensemble. This quasicontinuum can be provided by the quantum mechanical tunneling decay of high angular momentum states populated in the source. Numerical calculations for dimers of a variety of elements suggest that this decay behavior can be expected for a wide range of species.