Mb. Sowaresat et al., DISSOCIATION-ENERGIES FOR SMALL CARBON CLUSTER IONS (C-2-19(-INDUCED DISSOCIATION()) MEASURED BY COLLISION), Journal of physical chemistry, 99(27), 1995, pp. 10736-10741
We report a collision-induced dissociation (CID) study of the stabilit
y and fragmentation behavior of carbon cluster ions, C-n(+) (n = 2-19)
. Measurements were made of the absolute CID cross sections, fragment
appearance potentials, and fragment branching ratios. Dissociation thr
eshold energies have been extracted for each cluster size by fitting t
he data. The threshold energies fluctuate strongly with cluster size.
Small clusters show strong even/odd alternations in stability, and the
results are in good agreement with theoretical dissociation energies.
For larger clusters a periodicity of four atoms is observed, superimp
osed on an overall decrease in stability with increasing size. For mos
t cluster sizes the dominant fragmentation channel is loss of C-3. For
C-15(+), C-16(+), and C-19(+), loss of five atoms is a major channel,
dominant in the case of C-16(+) and C-19(+).