Dynamics of resonant low-energy electron attachment to ethanol-producing hydroxide anions

Abstract

Dynamics of dissociative electron attachment to ethanol is experimentally investigated at the Feshbach resonance formed with incident electron energies near 9.5 eV. Highly differential laboratoryframe momentum distributions of OH − fragments are measured, for a series of energies spanning the resonance width, using the velocity map imaging (VMI) technique. The OH − kinetic energy distribution indicates that the C-O breaking dissociation process could either be a three-body dissociation or a two-body dissociation with significant rovibrational excited fragments. The small but significant anisotropy in the OH − angular distribution provides signatures of the molecular symmetry of the associated resonant state under the axial recoil approximation, which assumes the dissociation is much faster than any rotation of the dissociation axis. Within these assumptions, the 9.5 eV Feshbach resonance can be assigned to the electronic transition from the (10a ′ ) orbital with its ground state Cs symmetry to the empty (4a ′′ ) level, involving the simultaneous electron attachment. This dynamics could be a model for C-O dissociation in larger alcohols and ethers.

Dynamics of dissociative electron attachment to aliphatic thiols

“…8 Interestingly, unlike S − from ethanethiol, no O − has been observed with high KE from DEA. 8,22 These findings indicate differences in the properties of the underlying resonant states in alcohols and thiols.…”

“…19 On the other hand, in DEA to H 2 S, SH − ions are reported at 2.4 eV. 14,20 Interestingly, both simple alcohols 21,22 and thiols 12 have shown the production of OH − and SH − ions, respectively. Moreover, the systematic investigations on simple organic alcohols have shown the presence of an H − channel at around 6.5 eV that arises from the hydroxyl group and shows strong functional group dependence.…”

Dissociative electron attachment studies of gas-phase acetic acid using a velocity map imaging technique

“…we multiplied the ion counts by the square of their corresponding distance from the center. To verify the correct practicality of using a weighted factor, before the present study, we applied this methodology to the O − kinetic energy distribution of DEA to CO 2 and compared our results with previous measurements [37], and was also recently applied for our studies on DEA to ethanol [38]. Figure 4 shows the weighted kinetic energy distribution showing a peak near 0.1 eV.…”