Model-independent determination of dissociation energies: method and applications

A number of methods are available for the purpose of extracting dissociation energies of polyatomic particles. Many of these techniques relate the rate of disintegration at a known excitation energy to the value of the dissociation energy. However, such a determination is susceptible to systematic uncertainties, mainly due to the unknown thermal properties of the particles and the potential existence of 'dark' channels, such as radiative cooling. These problems can be avoided with a recently developed procedure, which applies energy-dependent reactions of the decay products as an uncalibrated thermometer. Thus, it allows a direct measurement of dissociation energies, without any assumption on properties of the system or on details of the disintegration process. The experiments have been performed in a Penning trap, where both rate constants and branching ratios have been measured. The dissociation energies determined with different versions of the method yield identical values, within a small uncertainty