The dissociative electron attachment to the gas phase nucleobase adenine is studied using two different experiments. A double focusing sector field mass spectrometer is utilized for measurements requiring high mass resolution, high sensitivity, and relative ion yields for all the fragment anions and a hemispherical electron monochromator instrument for high electron energy resolution. The negative ion mass spectra are discussed at two different electron energies of 2 and 6 eV. In contrast to previous gas phase studies a number of new negative ions are discovered in the mass spectra. The ion efficiency curves for the negative ions of adenine are measured for the electron energy range from about 0 to 15 eV with an electron energy resolution of about 100 meV. The total anion yield derived via the summation of all measured fragment anions is compared with the total cross section for negative ion formation measured recently without mass spectrometry. For adenine the shape of the two cross section curves agrees well, taking into account the different electron energy resolutions; however, for thymine some peculiar differences are observed.

We study dissociative electron attachment to furan (FN) (C(4)H(4)O), tetrahydrofuran (THF) (C(4)H(8)O), and fructose (FRU) (C(6)H(12)O(6)) using crossed electron/molecular beams experiments with mass spectrometric detection of the anions. We find that FN and THF are weak electron scavengers and subjected to dissociative electron attachment essentially in the energy range above 5.5 eV via core excited resonances. In striking contrast to that, FRU is very sensitive towards low energy electrons generating a variety of fragment ions via a pronounced low energy feature close to 0 eV. These reactions are associated with the degradation of the ring structure and demonstrate that THF cannot be used as surrogate to model deoxyribose in DNA with respect to the attack of electrons at subexcitation energies (<3 eV). The results support the picture that in DNA the sugar moiety itself is an active part in the initial molecular processes leading to single strand breaks.

Here we report the first mass spectrometric study of negative ions formed via free electron attachment (EA) to nucleobases (NBs) embedded in helium clusters. Pure and mixed clusters of adenine and thymine have been formed by pickup of isolated NB molecules by cold helium droplets. In contrast to EA of isolated molecules in the gas phase we observe a long-lived parent anion NB- and, in addition, parent cluster ions NB-n up to size n=6. Moreover, we show that a low energy electron penetrating into a doped helium droplet causes efficient damage of the embedded nucleobases via resonant, site selective, dissociative electron attachment.

We report on the production and study of stable, highly charged droplets of superfluid helium. Using a novel experimental setup we produce neutral beams of liquid helium nanodroplets containing millions of atoms or more that can be ionized by electron impact, mass-per-charge selected, and ionized a second time before being analyzed. Droplets containing up to 55 net positive charges are identified and the appearance sizes of multiply charge droplets are determined as a function of charge state. We show that the droplets are stable on the millisecond time scale of the experiment and decay through the loss of small charged clusters, not through symmetric Coulomb explosions.

A high sensitivity, high resolution tandem mass spectrometer to research low-energy, reactive ion-surface interactions Review of Scientific Instruments 91, 065101 (2020);

Attachment of free electrons to water clusters embedded in helium droplets leads to water-cluster anions (H2O)n(-) and (D2O)n(-) of size n > or = 2. Small water-cluster anions bind to up to 10 helium atoms, providing compelling evidence for the low temperature of these complexes, but the most abundant species are bare cluster anions. In contrast to previous experiments on bare water clusters, which showed very pronounced magic and anti-magic anion sizes below n = 12, the presently observed size distributions vary much more smoothly, and all sizes are easily observed. Noticeable differences are also observed in the stoichiometry of fragment anions formed upon dissociative electron attachment and the energy dependence of their yield. Spectroscopic characterization of these ultracold water-cluster anions promises to unravel the relevance of metastable configurations in experiments and the nature of the still controversial bonding sites for the excess electron in small water-cluster anions.

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