Eur. Phys. J. D 36, 179-185 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2005-00264-8

Photodissociation of stored metal clusters

Fragment-abundance spectra after multisequential decay of Au₃₀⁺

¹ Institut für Physik, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, Domstr. 10a, 17487 Greifswald, Germany
² Department of Physics, Göteborg University, 41296 Gothenburg, Sweden
³ Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 55099 Mainz, Germany
⁴ Imperial College London, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BW, UK

Corresponding author: ^a alexander.herlert@cern.ch

Received: 3 June 2005
Revised: 18 August 2005
Published online: 4 October 2005

Abstract

Ion trapping allows detailed studies of atomic clusters with various interactions and over a large range of timescales. An overview of methods at hand is given and a specific example is presented in detail where size-selected Au₃₀⁺ clusters have been stored in a Penning trap and photofragmented by exposure to the third harmonic of a Nd:YAG laser. The resulting mass spectra were sampled after reaction periods varying from 10 μs to 1 s. The data are used to extract relative dissociation energies, which agree well with model-free values determined previously by other means, albeit with a slightly larger magnitude of the odd-even effect. Below the relative dissociation energies extracted from the abundance spectra develop very little over the five orders of magnitude in time covered in the experiments. This behavior has been predicted, but not tested previously. Above both spectra and dissociation energies develop odd-even effects after a storage time of 10–100 ms. Possible reasons for this behavior are discussed.