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Imaging SF6 with K-shell molecular-frame photoelectron angular distributions

O. Dennis McGinnis1,*, Nico Diehl2, Laura Sommerlad1, Andreas Pier1, Niklas Melzer1, Sven Grundmann1, Nikolay M. Novikovskiy2, Reinhard Dörner1, Till Jahnke3 et al.

Florian Trinter4,† and Philipp V. Demekhin2,‡

  • *Contact author: mcginnis@atom.uni-frankfurt.de
  • †Contact author: trinter@fhi-berlin.mpg.de
  • ‡Contact author: demekhin@physik.uni-kassel.de
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Phys. Rev. A 113, 053114 – Published 21 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/68bc-m3y9

Abstract

We report a joint experimental and theoretical study of K-shell photoionization of S and F atoms in sulfur hexafluoride, SF6. In our experiment, we employed tunable synchrotron radiation to generate photoelectrons emitted from the 1s shells of the S and F atoms with different kinetic energies. Coincident electron- and fragment-ion detection, carried out using cold target recoil-ion momentum spectroscopy, enabled access to polarization-averaged molecular-frame photoelectron angular distributions. In addition, we performed electronic structure calculations within the relaxed-core Hartree-Fock approximation by using a stationary single-center method. The calculations are in good agreement with the experiment. Our results support previous findings on the feasibility of imaging three-dimensional atomic arrangements in molecules using polarization-averaged molecular-frame angular distributions. In particular, we demonstrate that such imaging is possible even at intermediate photoelectron kinetic energies and even for six experimentally undistinguished F 1s emitters.

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Phys. Rev. A 113, 053114– Published 21 May, 2026
  • Received 9 March 2026
  • Accepted 8 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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