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Abstract
There are myriads of ions that are deemed too short-lived to be experimentally accessible. One of them is SF6+. It has never been observed, although not for lack of trying. We demonstrate that long-lived SF6+ can be formed by doping charged helium nanodroplets (HNDs) with sulfur hexafluoride; excess helium is then gently stripped from the doped HNDs by collisions with helium gas. The ion is identified by high-resolution mass spectrometry (resolution m/Dm = 15000), the close agreement between the expected and observed yield of ions that contain minor sulfur isotopes, and collision-induced dissociation (CID) in which mass-selected HenSF6+ ions are collided with helium gas. Under optimized conditions, the yield of SF6+ exceeds that of SF5+. The procedure is versatile and suitable to stabilize many other transient molecular ions.
Department
Physics
Publication Date
4-22-2021
Journal Title
Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
Language
English
Publisher
American Chemical Society
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
S. Albertini, S. Bergmeister, F. Laimer, P. Martini, E. Gruber, F. Zappa, M. Ončák, P. Scheier, and O. Echt, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 12 (2021) 4112-4117
Rights
© 2021 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society
Included in
Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Commons, Computational Chemistry Commons, Physical Chemistry Commons
Comments
This is an Open Access article published by ACS Publications in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters in 2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01024