Fragmentation and internal steric rearrangement of C60- in electron transfer dynamics

The crossed molecular beam technique is used for producing C60- species through potassium-buckyball collision processes, and studying the collision dynamics in an energy ranging from 10 eV up to 500 eV. At low collision energies only the negative parent ion is formed. As long as the collision energy is increased the fragmentation pattern of the fullerene negative ion could be identified and relative total cross-sections could be measured. Surprisingly, some satellite contributions have been observed in the band structure of C60- parent ion time-of-flight spectrum, which points to the existence of distinct conformational C60- isomers, which are likely to be formed during the collision, favoured by the strong polarization of the C60- in the presence of the K+ projectile ion. Such presumed detection of different spheroidal metastable C60- conformers was made possible due to an electric effect operating at the nanoscale.