https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01024">
 

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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)

https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01024

Document Type

Article

Rights

© 2021 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society

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

Additional Files
2021 Albert JPCL SI.pdf (214 kB)
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