Vanishing effect in post-collision interaction during photon-excited Coster-Kronig decay

Abstract
In radiationless transitions to atomic inner-shell hole states produced by threshold photoionization, the Auger electron energy is shifted up by post-collision interaction between the two continuum electrons. According to both semiclassical and quantum-mechanical models, this shift is expected to disappear if the photoelectron energy exceeds that of the Auger electron (the vanishing or ‘‘no-passing’’ effect). This effect, recently observed for a long-lived [4d] hole state of Xe, is now also demonstrated for the very fast Xe L2-L3 N4 (J=3) Coster-Kronig transition, excited with synchrotron radiation.