Interatomic and intermolecular Coulombic decay: the coming of age story

In pioneering work by Cederbaum et al an excitation mechanism was proposed that occurs only in loosely bound matter (Cederbaum et al 1997 Phys. Rev. Lett. 79 4778): it turned out, that (in particular) in cases where a local Auger decay is energetically forbidden, an excited atom or molecule is able to decay in a scheme which was termed 'interatomic Coulombic decay' (or 'intermolecular Coulombic decay') (ICD). As ICD occurs, the excitation energy is released by transferring it to an atomic or molecular neighbor of the initially excited particle. As a consequence the neighboring atom or molecule is ionized as it receives the energy. A few years later the existence of ICD was confirmed experimentally (Marburger et al 2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 203401; Jahnke et al 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 163401; Ohrwall et al 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 173401) by different techniques. Since this time it has been found that ICD is not (as initially suspected) an exotic feature of van der Waals or hydrogen bonded systems, but that ICD is a very general and common feature occurring after a manifold of excitation schemes and in numerous weakly bound systems, as revealed by more than 200 publications. It was even demonstrated, that ICD can become more efficient than a local Auger decay in some system. This review will concentrate on recent experimental investigations on ICD. It will briefly introduce the phenomenon and give a short summary of the 'early years' of ICD (a detailed view on this episode of investigations can be found in the review article by U Hergenhahn with the same title (Hergenhahn 2011 J. Electron Spectrosc. Relat. Phenom. 184 78)). More recent articles will be presented that investigate the relevance of ICD in biological systems and possible radiation damage of such systems due to ICD. The occurrence of ICD and ICD-like processes after different excitation schemes and in different systems is covered in the middle section: in that context the helium dimer (He-2) is a particularly interesting (and exotic) system in which ICD was detected. It was employed in several publications to elucidate the strong impact of nuclear motion on ICD and its longrange-character. The review will present these findings and their initial theoretical predictions and give insight into most recent time-resolved measurements of ICD.