Unified treatment of dissociation and ionization processes in molecular hydrogen

A theoretical procedure is introduced which yields eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the reactance matrix pertaining to competing dissociation and ionization processes in molecular Rydberg states. A calculation is set up in terms of adiabatic (nuclear-coordinate dependent) quantum defects μ(R) which contain the essence of the physics of the excited molecular complex at short range. The application to preionized and predissociated resonances in the H2 spectrum yields good agreement with experiment