Coulomb-explosion imaging of carbon monoxide dimers

The authors use a COLTRIMS setup and Coulomb-explosion imaging to deduce the structure of (CO)${}_{2}$ from two- and three-body dissociation induced by collisions with highly charged argon ions. The structure of the dimer is found to be very diffuse and to be compatible with a purely random orientation of each CO molecule in the dimer. The mean intermolecular distance is found to correspond to the predicted true ground state of the CO dimer with a planar C-bonded geometry.