https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2020-10146-0
Regular Article
Sublimation of Li@C60★,★★
1
EaStCHEM and School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, David Brewster Rd., Edinburgh EH9 3JF, UK
2
School of Physics, Konkuk University, Seoul 05029, South Korea
3
EaStCHEM and School of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews KY16 9ST, UK
a e-mail: eleanor.campbell@ed.ac.uk
Received:
9
March
2020
Received in final form:
16
April
2020
Published online:
16
June
2020
Experiments that probe the fundamental properties of endohedral fullerenes often require the preparation of molecular beams or thin films of the neutral molecules. It is challenging to cleanly sublime this class of molecules without producing some thermal degradation. We report combined gas phase and scanning tunnelling microscopy studies that probe the thermal decay of commercial [Li+C60]PF6- in a quartz ampoule and provide treatment conditions that will allow the sublimation of intact, neutral Li@C60 accompanied by a well-characterised component of neutral C60. The decay of the material at appropriate temperatures can be modelled with the assumption of a second order decay process in the oven yielding Arrhenius parameters that can predict the ratio of Li@C60 to C60 in the sublimed material.
Contribution to the Topical Issue “Atomic Cluster Collisions (2019)”, edited by Alexey Verkhovtsev, Pablo de Vera, Nigel J. Mason, Andrey V. Solov’yov.
Supplementary material in the form of one pdf file available from the Journal web page at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2020-10146-0.
© The Author(s) 2020. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
