Doubly-charged Negative Ion of C60 Molecule

Within the Dirac- and Lorentz-bubble potential models an electronic structure of the doubly-charged negative ion has been studied by a variational method. It is shown that even in the first approximation of this method when a trial wave function of the two electrons is represented as a product of one-electron functions the total energy of the system is negative, a manifestation of the existence of a stable state of the doubly-charged negative ion in these models. The second electron affinity of C60 according to estimation is about 2 1 eV. The photodetachment cross sections ( ) of this ion have been calculated as well. Near threshold ( ) is found to exhibit peculiar and interesting behavior. The first cross section accompanied by the transformation of the doubly-charged negative ion into a singly-charged one is exponentially small near the process threshold. The second cross section corresponds to the photodetachment of a singly-charged ion; it increases at the threshold as a power function of the kinetic energy of the photoelectron. These cross sections are of the same order as the photodetachment cross sections of atomic ions with the same electron affinity.