Highly excited C₂⁻ ions prominently feature electron detachment at a mean decay time near 3 milliseconds with hitherto unexplained origin. Considering various sources of unimolecular decay, we attribute the signal to the electronic C⁴Σ⁺ᵤ state. Quartet C₂⁻ levels are found to be stabilized against autodetachment by high rotation. Time constants of their rotationally assisted autodetachment into levels opening energetically at lower rotation are calculated by a theory based on the non-local resonance model. For some final levels of significantly less rotation the results conclusively explain the puzzling observations.
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Schmidt et al. (2024) studied this question.
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