| Interatomic decay is a recently discovered group of phenomena having a profound effect on the dynamics of highly excited states of neutral and ionized clusters. The most prominent among the interatomic decay processes studied so far is interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD), in which an inner-valence vacancy localized on one atom or molecule in a cluster decays by emission of an electron from another atom or molecule. The principal question arising in the study of this and similar processes is the time scale of the decay. A new efficient ab initio quantum chemical approach to the calculation of interatomic decay rates as well as its applications will be presented. It will be argued that due to the effect of nuclear dynamics, the energy-resolved ICD experiments usually fail to provide a direct information on the decay time scale. Thus, interatomic decay is a natural field for application of the time-resolved attosecond spectroscopy. |
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