Failure of hydrogenation in protecting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from fragmentation

Abstract

A recent study of soft X-ray absorption in native and hydrogenated coronene cations, C${}_{24}$H${}_{12+m}^{+}$ $m=0-7$, led to the conclusion that additional hydrogen atoms protect (interstellar) Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules from fragmentation [Reitsma et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 053002 (2014)]. The present experiment with collisions between fast (30-200 eV) He atoms and pyrene (C${}_{16}$H${}_{10+m}^{+}$, $m=0$, 6, and 16) and simulations without reference to the excitation method suggests the opposite. We find that the absolute carbon-backbone fragmentation cross section does not decrease but increases with the degree of hydrogenation for pyrene molecules.

10 pages, 5 figures

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Photo-stability of super-hydrogenated PAHs determined by action spectroscopy experiments
• Photodissociation of aliphatic PAH derivatives under relevant astrophysical conditions
• Molecular hydrogen formation on interstellar PAHs through Eley-Rideal abstraction reactions
• Classical molecular dynamics simulations of fusion and fragmentation in fullerene-fullerene collisions
• Fragmentation and isomerization of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the interstellar medium: coronene as a case study
• Hydrogenated pyrene: Statistical single-carbon loss below the knockout threshold
• Evolution of Fullerenes in Circumstellar Envelopes by Carbon Condensation: Insights from Reactive Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Top-down formation of ethylene from fragmentation of superhydrogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
• DESIREE electrospray ion source test bench and setup for Collision Induced Dissociation experiments
• Knockout driven fragmentation of porphyrins