10min:

XING JIANG, JASON O. CLEVENGER, SERGEY I. PANOV AND ROBERT W. FIELD, Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.

We will report experimental results from the pulsed optical-optical double resonance study of Calcium Monofluoride(CaF). These spectra are recorded via D ^{2 +} state of CaF in the autoionization region above v⁺=0 ionization potential with n*=15 45. Compared to the OODR spectra of CaCl obtained previously in the same region, more ^{2 +} and ² states are assigned for CaF. This can be explained by the predissociation of CaCl. In this autoionization region the disappearance or shift of some members of the predicted CaF core-penetrating series reveals the existence of perturbation between certain states, which is not the case for CaCl. The OODR spectra of CaF in the high-n* region indicate that the vibrationally autoionizing states of CaF converge to v⁺>0 vibrational levels of CaF⁺ ion. This work completes previous studies of CaF by exploiting different intermediate states, e.g. the reverse-polarized C ² state, to investigate the vibrational constant _e for each Rydberg series and the corresponding quantum defect derivative with respect to the internuclear distance R⁺, which controls the autoionization process.