0000000000262245

AUTHOR

Preben Hvelplund

Temperature concepts for small, isolated systems: 1/t decay and radiative cooling

We report on progress in our investigations of cluster cooling. The analysis of measurements is based on introduction of the microcanonical temperature and a statistical description of the decay of an ensemble with a broad distribution in temperature. The resulting time dependence of the decay rate is a power law close to t �1 , replaced by nearly exponential decay after a characteristic time for quenching by radiative cooling. We focus on results obtained for fullerenes, both anions and cations and recently also neutral C60.

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Fragmentation of anthracene C14H10, acridine C13H9N and phenazine C12H8N2 ions in collisions with atoms

International audience; We report experimental total, absolute, fragmentation cross sections for anthracene C14H10, acridine C13H9N, and phenazine C12H8N2 ions colliding with He at center-of-mass energies close to 100 eV. In addition, we report results for the same ions colliding with Ne, Ar, and Xe at higher energies. The total fragmentation cross sections for these three ions are the same within error bars for a given target. The measured fragment mass distributions reveal significant contributions from both delayed (≫10−12 s) statistical fragmentation processes as well as non-statistical, prompt (∼10−15 s), single atom knockout processes. The latter dominate and are often followed by sec…

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Nonstatistical fragmentation of large molecules

International audience; We present experimental evidence for the dominance of prompt single-atom knockout in fragmenting collisions between large polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon cations and He atoms at center-of-mass energies close to 100 eV. Such nonstatistical processes are shown to give highly reactive fragments. We argue that nonstatistical fragmentation is dominant for any sufficiently large molecular system under similar conditions.

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