Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
Introduction
Electron–electron correlation plays a crucial role in determining physical and chemical properties in a wide class of materials that exhibit fascinating properties including, for example, high-temperature superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance, metal insulator or ferromagnetic anti-ferromagnetic phase transitions, self assembly and quantum size effects. Furthermore, electron–electron correlation governs the dynamics of charged bodies via long-range Coulomb interaction, whose proper description constitutes one of the more severe tests of quantum mechanics.
Nevertheless, the effects due to correlation remain rather elusive for almost all of the experimental methods currently used to investigate matter in its various states of aggregation. Indeed, being related to processes with two active electrons, like satellite structures in photoemission (i.e., ionization processes with one ejected and one excited electron), or double ionization events, they influence marginally the spectral responses of the target, that are primarily determined by single and independent particle behaviours. Hence the experimental effort devoted in the last 30 years to develop a new class of experiments, whose spectral response is determined mainly by the correlated behaviour of electron pairs.
The common denominator of this class of experiments is the study of reactions whose final state has two holes in the valence orbitals and two unbound electrons in the continuum. It is exactly through interaction of these holes and electron pairs that correlation shapes the cross section of the double ionization processes.
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