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Observation And Identification Of Metastable Excited States In Ultrafast Laser-Ionized Pyridine, David B. Foote, Timothy D. Scarborough, Cornelis J. Uiterwaal

C.J.G.J. Uiterwaal Publications

We report on the fragmentation of ionized pyridine (C₅H₅N) molecules by focused 50 fs, 800 nm laser pulses. Such ionization produces several metastable ionic states that fragment within the field-free drift region of a reflectron- type time of flight mass spectrometer, with one particular metastable dissociation being the leading fragmentation process. Because the time of flight is no longer dependent in a simple way on the mass of the ion, the metastable decay is manifested as an unfocused peak on the mass spectrum that appears at a time of flight not corresponding to an integer mass. …