Nonsequential and Sequential Fragmentation of CO23+ in Intense Laser Fields

We experimentally studied the three-body fragmentation dynamics of CO2 initiated by intense femto-second laser pulses. Sequential and nonsequential fragmentations were precisely separated and identified for CO23+ to break up into O+ + C+ + O+ ions. With accurate measurements of three-dimensional momentum vectors of the correlated atomic ions and calculations of the high-level ab initio potential of CO23+, we reconstructed the geometric structure of CO23+ before fragmentation, which turns out to be very close to that of the neutral CO2 molecule before laser irradiation. Our study indicated that Coulomb explosion is a promising approach for imaging geometric structures of polyatomic molecules if the fragmentation dynamics can be clearly clarified and the appropriate dissociation potential is provided for multiply charged molecular ions. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.103601