Kick off April with us at our next STEM Bytes seminar on Tuesday, April 1 from 11 – 11:30am on Zoom!

To register, visit tinyurl.com/stembytes4-1

Speaker: Nayanthara Karippara Jayadev
Talk: The Effects of Spin-Orbit Coupling in Auger Decay

X-ray based spectroscopies are used to probe the electronic structure of atoms and molecules. X-ray absorption creates electron vacancies in the core shell, leaving the molecule in a highly excited state. Such molecules with core vacancies predominantly decay via Auger process when comprised of light atoms. Auger decay is an autoionization process in which a valence electron fills the core hole and liberates sufficient energy to eject another electron to the ionization continuum. The theoretical modeling of Auger decay is challenging owing to the metastable nature of core-ionized (regular decay) or core-excited (resonant decay) states and the continuum nature of the ejected electron. One of the recent theoretical approaches for computing Auger decay rates are based on Feshbach-Fano resonance theory combined with the equation-of-motion coupled-cluster (EOM-CC) framework. In this work, we propose a novel extension to calculating Auger decay widths by incorporating the spin-orbit coupling (SOC).