Abstract
We present a study of cationic and protonated clusters of neon and krypton. Recent studies using argon have shown that protonated rare gas clusters can have very different magic sizes than pure, cationic clusters. Here, we find that neon behaves similarly to argon, but that the cationic krypton is more similar to its protonated counterparts than the lighter rare gases are, sharing many of the same magic numbers.
Highlights
Clusters of rare gas atoms are elegant systems for studying the packing of spherically symmetric particles into highly symmetric geometries
For Kr, which has less overlap with the He series, abundance anomalies are visible at n = 7 and 13. Both measurements contain mixtures of the pure rare gas clusters and clusters that contain hydrogen, mainly in the form of a single proton/deuteron that is formed by the breakup of H2/D2 during ionization
From the overview spectrum alone, it is not clear whether magic numbers arise from the pure rare gas clusters and which ones come from the protonated counterparts
Summary
Clusters of rare gas atoms are elegant systems for studying the packing of spherically symmetric particles into highly symmetric geometries They were the subject of much interest in the mass spectrometry community from the 1980s on, when measurements of charged clusters formed in supersonic expansions showed the characteristic magic numbers associated with icosahedral (sub-)shells [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Theoretical calculations showed that for the protonated systems, the charge-carrying proton forms a bridge between two Ar atoms, nearly preserving the Ar–Ar separation and the overall symmetry of the neutral systems [7, 8] This reduces the strain on the structures, giving the ArnH+ clusters the same magic numbers as for model Lennard-Jones
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