Collisions of with neutral : Charge transfer and fragmentation

Fragmentation of fullerenes by collisions with multiply charged ions has been studied experimentally for collision energies of . For high projectile charges the potential energy of the projectiles is mainly responsible for the processes induced: the fragment spectra are dominated by multiply charged parent ions and small fragment ions such as and . With decreasing projectile charge, fragmentation induced by the kinetic projectile energy becomes increasingly important, leading to a decreasing yield of surviving ions and an increasing number of fragments with n in the range 2-12. Widths and shapes of the fragment peaks in the measured time-of-flight spectra allow us to determine the kinetic energy release for various fragmentation processes and to distinguish between evaporation of neutral molecules from vibrationally excited ions on the one hand, and super-asymmetric fission into two charged fragments, on the other.