Vertical Photoionization of Liquid-to-Supercritical Ammonia: Thermal Effects on the Valence-to-Conduction Band Gap

Abstract

We recently reported first femtosecond pump–probe experiments on the geminate recombination dynamics of solvated electrons in fluid ammonia (Urbanek et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 2012, 116, 2223–2233). The electrons were generated through a vertical two-photon ionization at a total energy of 9.3 eV. Here, we present a full Monte Carlo analysis of the time-resolved data to determine the solvated electron’s thermalization distance from the ionization hole, NH(3)(+). The simulations are compared with the experiment over wide thermodynamic conditions to obtain insight into the dependence of the vertical ionization mechanism on the electronic properties of the solvent network. The simulations reveal that the average thermalization distance, <r(0)>, decreases strongly with both increasing temperature, T, and decreasing density, ρ, from 3.2 nm in the cryogenic fluid down to roughly 0.5 nm in the dilute supercritical phase with almost gas-like densities. We combine our results with the current understanding of the T,ρ-dependence of the electronic structure of the liquid phase and discuss in detail the role of thermally induced energy level shifts for the valence-to-conduction band gap. The observed changes of the thermalization distance can be well attributed to a gradual decrease of the excess energy initially imparted on the ejected electron as gas-like conditions are progressively approached.