“Softlanding” of Monodispersed Small Metal Clusters in Rare Gas Matrices.

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe report on the successful softlanding of size selected metal clusters in rare gas matrices. Cluster-ions are sputtered from a metal target, energy filtered and mass selected by a quadrupole mass filter. Deposited clusters are detected by optical spectroscopic methods ( absorption, excitation, fluorescence). Our results show that for dimers and trimers fragmentation decreases with decreasing landing energy. In the case of Ag2 for example fewer than 25% of the dimers fragment when they are deposited at 20 eV. Triatomic clusters appear to fragment less easily than the dimers. New spectroscopic transitions have been found for both diatomic and triatomic clusters. Our results, when compared with previous studies on conventionally prepared clusters, show that some dimer and trimer features are incorrectly assigned.