Kinetic energies of carbon cluster ions produced in C60-multifragmentation by heavy ion collisions

Abstract

Collision-induced fragmentation of C60 by 1-4 MeV Si1-4+ ions has been studied using a time-of-flight technique, and initial kinetic energies of fragment ions were deduced from the peak profile analysis. The kinetic energies of the small clusters decrease with increasing cluster size in the range 1-10 eV, while those of the large fragments are nearly constant values of about 0.05 eV. The results indicate that the process is dominated by hard inelastic collisions such as collective-excitation or inner-shell excitation leading to the formation of highly unstable states followed by multi-fragmentation.