Delayed photofission of dianionic tin clusters

Alexander Jankowski; Paul Fischer; Moritz Grunwald-Delitz; Lutz Schweikhard

doi:10.1140/epjd/s10053-025-00965-4

2023 Impact factor 1.5

Atomic, Molecular, Optical and Plasma Physics

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. D (2025) 79: 14
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/s10053-025-00965-4

Regular Article – Clusters and Nanostructures

Delayed photofission of dianionic tin clusters

Alexander Jankowski^a, Paul Fischer, Moritz Grunwald-Delitz and Lutz Schweikhard

Institut für Physik, Universität Greifswald, Felix-Hausdorff-Straße 6, 17489, Greifswald, Germany

^a alexander.jankowski@uni-greifswald.de

Received: 27 November 2024
Accepted: 22 January 2025
Published online: 20 February 2025

Abstract

Dianionic tin clusters ${Sn}_{34}^{2 -}$ $\textrm{Sn}_{34}^{2-}$ stored in a Penning trap are excited by nanosecond laser pulses with photon energies ranging from 2.0 to $4.7 eV$ $4.7\,\textrm{eV}$ , resulting in delayed decays. Time-resolved measurements with varying delays between laser irradiation and fragment analysis from a few ten microseconds to a second reveal matching exponential appearance constants of several singly charged dissociation products. This indicates that the dianions undergo fission into competing pairs of ${Sn}_{10}^{-}$ $\textrm{Sn}_{10}^{-}$ + ${Sn}_{24}^{-}$ $\textrm{Sn}_{24}^{-}$ and ${Sn}_{15}^{-}$ $\textrm{Sn}_{15}^{-}$ + ${Sn}_{19}^{-}$ $\textrm{Sn}_{19}^{-}$ . Furthermore, matching decay constants for high photon energies of twice the low-energy values indicate that the decay observed at the low energies results from two-photon excitation.The delayed photodecay of dianionic tin clusters shows competing dissociation pathways by fission into two singly charged product clusters. Further sequential decay processes are investigated.

© The Author(s) 2025

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.