Theoretical study of dissociative recombination of tri-atomic molecular ions

We consider the process of dissociative recombination of tri-atomic ions. Successful theoretical treatment of the dissociative recombination in H$_3^+$ motivated us to extend the treatment to other small molecular ions. The most straightforward extension is to apply the treatment to other isotopomers of H$_3^+$. In this work, we calculated the dissociative recombination rate of H$_2$D$^+$ and D$_2$H$^+$. To represent properly vibrational motion we use hyperspherical coordinates within so-called Slow Variable Representation. The calculated rates for the dissociative recombination of H$_2$D$^+$ and D$_2$H$^+$ are in good agreement with recent experiments in storage rings. In this work, we also suggest a possible solution to the problem posed by a recent stationary afterglow experiment. In that experiment, a very low dissociative recombination rate was found that seems to contradict with the results from storage ring and our calculation. In addition, preliminary results for the dissociative recombination in HCO$^+$ are presented. This work is supported by NSF-ITR grant #PHY-0427460