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Electronic ground state of Ni2
V Zamudio-Bayer1, R Lindblad1, C Bülow1
1Institut für Methoden und Instrumentierung der Forschung mit Synchrotronstrahlung, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie, Albert-Einstein-Straße 15, 12489 Berlin, Germany.
Abstract:
The Φ9/24 ground state of the Ni2+ diatomic molecular cation is determined experimentally from temperature and magnetic-field-dependent x-ray magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy in a cryogenic ion trap, where an electronic and rotational temperature of 7.4±0.2 K was reached by buffer gas cooling of the molecular ion. The contribution of the spin dipole operator to the x-ray magnetic circular dichroism spin sum rule amounts to 7Tz=0.17±0.06μB per atom, approximately 11% of the spin magnetic moment. We find that, in general, homonuclear diatomic molecular cations of 3d transition metals seem to adopt maximum spin magnetic moments in their electronic ground states.
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