Anionic Reactions Degrading SF6 Using Metals: Insights From the Gas Phase

Alkali metals have been used to degrade SF6 in liquid ammonia. The products include metal fluorides. In this study, we reacted K- and Ag- with SF6 in a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. The atomic metal anions were formed by in-source collision-induced dissociation (CID) of their respective oxalate salts as previously described by our group. The only two reaction products observed were SF6- and SF5-. At low collision energy, the latter was deduced to be formed via an abstraction by the metal of F from SF6- formed by electron transfer in the encounter complex between the metal anion and neutral SF6. As the collision energy was increased, there was evidence of a CID contribution to SF5- directly from SF6-.