Unified description of radiative and dielectronic recombination, including the coupling between autoionization and radiation continua

Abstract

Although dielectronic and radiative recombination are usually treated as distinct noninterfering processes, Alber, Cooper, and Rau [Phys. Rev. A 30, 2845 (1984)] have recently presented a scattering- or S-matrix analysis which provides a unified description of these processes. This description employs a diagonalization of the atom plus radiation field Hamiltonian using a limited basis set consisting of one discrete autoionizing state, a single-electron continuum, and a single-photon continuum. In the present work we extend Mo?ller scattering operator and resolvent operator techniques, which have previously been used to discuss the decay of prepared systems, in order to provide an S-matrix analysis of the electron-ion photorecombination process near an isolated autoionizing resonance. We explicitly allow for degenerate magnetic sublevels of the atomic system and for multiple angular momentum contributions in the partial-wave expansion of the electron-continuum eigenstate. After the introduction of the pole approximation, in which only the δ-function term is retained in the evaluation of the various self-energies that occur in the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian for the combined many-electron radiation-field system, we obtain the total electron-ion photorecombination cross section as the sum of the radiative and dielectronic recombination contributions together with the conventionally ignored interference term.