Tunneling of a diatomic molecule incident upon a potential barrier

Abstract

We study a diatomic homonuclear molecule incident upon a potential barrier. We allow transitions between binding energy states of the molecule during the process of tunneling and consider both single and double barriers. By applying an elegant method to solve this system we show that transmission resonances do occur in both cases and that expressions for the locations of the resonances can be found. Moreover, we find that the addition of binding energy levels tends to decrease the probability of tunneling. We also show that by relaxing rigor and treating the length of the molecule as though it is fixed we can obtain exact analytical expressions for the transmission probability that capture important features of the full solution.