Interfering Resonances: Avoided Crossings of Autoionizing States in Molecules

The internuclear separation is used as a continuous parameter to vary the coupling strength between resonances of different autoionizing series in order to study the interference effects and the validity of independent-resonance models. This interference can have profound effects on the autoionization mechanism, which are demonstrated for $e^{-}+\mathrm{H}_2^{}{}_{}{}^{+}$ collisions. The new feature predicted by our calculations is the analog in the resonance case of avoided crossings for bound states and opens new avenues for an understanding of the autoionization process and has interesting experimental implications.