Time resolved photofragmentation of Au+15 clusters

Au+15 ions were produced by laser vaporization and transferred into a Penning trap. They were illuminated by a 10 ns dye-laser pulse at photon energies covering the range from 2.7 to 4.4 eV. Besides the determination of fragmentation patterns and photoabsorption cross sections the monomer evaporation of the excited clusters was observed time resolved on a microsecond to millisecond timescale yielding a monomer separation energy of 1.95(5) eV. In addition, the dissociation energy for Au+14 could be determined as 1.57(5) eV by time resolved investigation of the sequential decay Au+15 → Au+14 + Au → Au+13 + 2 Au.