Radiative cooling of a small metal cluster: The case of V-13(+)

Size-selected stood metal cluster ions, V-13(+), have been heated by photoe xcitation (lambda = 730 to 229 nm) to well-defined excitation energies corr esponding to temperatures between 1000 and 2100 K. A millisecond pump-probe photodissociation technique was applied to measure the time-resolved radia tive cooling. The observed decay rates are directly related to the radiativ e energy loss and are explained quantitatively by the competing processes o f photoemission and atom evaporation.