Proceedings of the workshop on some aspects of autoionization in atoms and small molecules

Do we really understand the phenomenon of autoionization in atoms sufficiently well to consider it a ''mature'' topic. Can we generalize our understanding to predict behavior in systems not yet studied. Can we extract physical understanding from the encouraging results of the ''many-body calculations''. Or must we still try to understand one atom at a time. Molecular autoionization is clearly more difficult. Not only must we content with ''vibrational autoionization'' as well as ''electronic autoionization'', but the competing process of predissociation must also be taken into account. In this molecular domain, we have many experiments and many phenomena. The extant theories only deal with some cases, and are not yet able to explain some prominent observations. A group consisting of theorists and experimentalists active in the field of autoionization assembled at Argonne National Laboratory for a two-day Workshop on May 2-3, 1985, to try to provide some consensus of our present understanding and to point out the most promising direction for progress in the near future. Abstracts of individual items from the workshop were prepared separately for the data base