학술논문
High-Precision Determination of Oxygen Kα Transition Energy Excludes Incongruent Motion of Interstellar Oxygen
Document Type
article
Author
Leutenegger, MA; Kühn, S; Micke, P; Steinbrügge, R; Stierhof, J; Shah, C; Hell, N; Bissinger, M; Hirsch, M; Ballhausen, R; Lang, M; Gräfe, C; Wipf, S; Cumbee, R; Betancourt-Martinez, GL; Park, S; Yerokhin, VA; Surzhykov, A; Stolte, WC; Niskanen, J; Chung, M; Porter, FS; Stöhlker, T; Pfeifer, T; Wilms, J; Brown, GV; López-Urrutia, JR Crespo; Bernitt, S
Source
Physical Review Letters. 125(24)
Subject
Language
Abstract
We demonstrate a widely applicable technique to absolutely calibrate the energy scale of x-ray spectra with experimentally well-known and accurately calculable transitions of highly charged ions, allowing us to measure the K-shell Rydberg spectrum of molecular O_{2} with 8 meV uncertainty. We reveal a systematic ∼450 meV shift from previous literature values, and settle an extraordinary discrepancy between astrophysical and laboratory measurements of neutral atomic oxygen, the latter being calibrated against the aforementioned O_{2} literature values. Because of the widespread use of such, now deprecated, references, our method impacts on many branches of x-ray absorption spectroscopy. Moreover, it potentially reduces absolute uncertainties there to below the meV level.