Eur. Phys. J. D (2016) 70: 140
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2016-70143-4

Regular Article

Low energy electron induced reactions in fluorinated acetamide – probing negative ions and neutral stable counterparts^*

¹ Siedlce University, Faculty of Sciences, 3 Maja 54, 08-110 Siedlce, Poland
² Institut für Chemie und Biochemie - Physikalische und Theoretische Chemie, Freie Universität Berlin, Takustrasse 3, 14195 Berlin, Germany
³ Institut für Angewandte und Physikalische Chemie, Universität Bremen, 28334 Bremen, Germany

^a e-mail: kopyra@uph.edu.pl

Received: 28 February 2016
Received in final form: 11 May 2016
Published online: 21 June 2016

Abstract

Electron impact to trifluoroacetamide (CF₃CONH₂, TFAA) in the energy range 0–12 eV leads to a variety of negative fragment ions which are formed via dissociative electron attachment (DEA). The underlying reactions range from single bond cleavages to remarkably complex reactions that lead to loss of the neutral units HF, H₂O and HNCO as deduced from their directly observed ionic counterparts (M – H₂O)⁻, (M – HF)⁻ and (M – HNCO)⁻. Also formed are the pseudo-halogen ions CN⁻ and OCN⁻. All these reactions proceed dominantly via a resonance located near 1 eV, i.e., electrons at subexcitation energies trigger reactions involving multiple bond cleavages. The electron induced generation of the neutral molecules HF, H₂O and HNCO in condensed TFAA films is probed by temperature controlled thermal desorption spectrometry (TDS) which can be viewed as a complementary techniques to gas-phase experiments in DEA to directly probe the neutral counterparts.