COLLISIONAL HEATING IN IONIC ARGON CLUSTERS - THE AR-2(+) CASE(AR)

The efficiency of collisionally induced vibrational excitations of arg on ionic dimer cores, seen as nucleation systems for ionic argon clust ers in supersonic expansion processes, is examined by computing quantu m mechanical excitation probabilities in collisional encounters with s ingle argon atoms. The calculations find the presence of 'core-excited ' Feshbach resonances at these energy regimes but also indicate that s uch effects are likely to play a marginal role in the formation of 'ho t' nucleation cores, a result which bears some consequences on the mic roscopic modelling of the growth of ionic microclusters of argon.