TY - JOUR
T1 - Modeling the dissociation and ionization of a sputtered organic molecule
AU - Solomko, V.
AU - Verstraete, M.
AU - Delcorte, A.
AU - Garrison, B. J.
AU - Gonze, X.
AU - Bertrand, P.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work and VS are supported by the European Union, contract NMP4-CT-2004-500198, “NANOQUANTA” Network of Excellence and the CRA program of the Communauté Française de Belgique (ARC no. 01/06-269). AD acknowledges the financial support of the Belgian FNRS. The support of the NSF through the Chemistry Division is gratefully acknowledged by BJG.
PY - 2006/7/30
Y1 - 2006/7/30
N2 - The evolution of an organic molecule after sputtering from a gold surface has been analyzed by classical molecular dynamics and ab initio calculations to gain insight into the ionization and fragmentation processes occurring in SIMS. The calculated ionization potential (6.2 eV) of the tetraphenylnaphthalene (TPN) molecule has been found to be close to the unimolecular dissociation energy (5.4 eV) of the most favorable reaction channel involving the loss of a phenyl ring. On the other hand, our calculations show that the internal energies of sputtered TPN molecules can be significantly larger than 5-6 eV. Therefore, it appears energetically possible to relax such excited molecules via both fragmentation and ionization. We propose to virtually decompose the TPN molecule into its basic fragments. The rationale is that, if the molecule is very excited, then separate parts (e.g. pendant phenyl rings) can interact with each other almost independently. The analysis of the molecular motion after emission shows that the oscillations along the phenyl-naphthalene bond direction, expected to induce the molecule fragmentation by the loss of a phenyl ring, are relatively small (they store only about 0.2 eV). On the other hand, the relative energy stored in the inter-phenyl interactions, modulated by their bending and responsible for ionization according to our hypothesis, oscillates over a range of 6-7 eV and favors ionization.
AB - The evolution of an organic molecule after sputtering from a gold surface has been analyzed by classical molecular dynamics and ab initio calculations to gain insight into the ionization and fragmentation processes occurring in SIMS. The calculated ionization potential (6.2 eV) of the tetraphenylnaphthalene (TPN) molecule has been found to be close to the unimolecular dissociation energy (5.4 eV) of the most favorable reaction channel involving the loss of a phenyl ring. On the other hand, our calculations show that the internal energies of sputtered TPN molecules can be significantly larger than 5-6 eV. Therefore, it appears energetically possible to relax such excited molecules via both fragmentation and ionization. We propose to virtually decompose the TPN molecule into its basic fragments. The rationale is that, if the molecule is very excited, then separate parts (e.g. pendant phenyl rings) can interact with each other almost independently. The analysis of the molecular motion after emission shows that the oscillations along the phenyl-naphthalene bond direction, expected to induce the molecule fragmentation by the loss of a phenyl ring, are relatively small (they store only about 0.2 eV). On the other hand, the relative energy stored in the inter-phenyl interactions, modulated by their bending and responsible for ionization according to our hypothesis, oscillates over a range of 6-7 eV and favors ionization.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.apsusc.2006.02.075
DO - 10.1016/j.apsusc.2006.02.075
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33747386159
SN - 0169-4332
VL - 252
SP - 6459
EP - 6462
JO - Applied Surface Science
JF - Applied Surface Science
IS - 19
ER -