Highly charged droplets of superfluid helium

Abstract

We report on the production and study of stable, highly charged droplets of superfluid helium. Using a novel experimental setup we produce neutral beams of liquid helium nanodroplets containing millions of atoms or more that can be ionized by electron impact, mass-per-charge selected, and ionized a second time before being analyzed. Droplets containing up to 55 net positive charges are identified and the appearance sizes of multiply charge droplets are determined as a function of charge state. We show that the droplets are stable on the millisecond time scale of the experiment and decay through the loss of small charged clusters, not through symmetric Coulomb explosions.

5 pages, 3 figures, published in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (2)

• Spectroscopy and dynamics in helium nanodroplets
• Solvation of Intrinsic Positive Charge in Superfluid Helium

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Proton transfer at subkelvin temperatures
• Dopant ionization and efficiency of ion and electron ejection from helium nanodroplets
• Phosphorus cluster cations formed in doped helium nanodroplets are different
• Long-lasting XUV activation of helium nanodroplets for avalanche ionization
• Isotope enrichment in neon clusters grown in helium nanodroplets
• XUV fluorescence as a probe of laser-induced helium nanoplasma dynamics
• Cyclic C${}_4^{+}$ as the carrier of the diffuse interstellar band at 503.9 nm?
• Mixed cationic clusters of nitrogen and hydrogen