The behavior of nitrosyl chloride (ClNO) exposed to ionizing radiation was studied by direct probing valence-shell electrons in temporal coincidence with ions originating from the fragmentation process of the transient ClNO2+. Such a molecular dication was produced by double photoionization with synchrotron radiation in the 24-70 eV photon energy range. The experiment has been conducted at the Elettra Synchrotron Facility of Basovizza (Trieste, Italy) using a light beam linearly polarized with the direction of the polarization vector parallel to the ClNO molecular beam axis. ClNO molecules crossing the photon beam at right angles in the scattering region are generated by effusive expansion and randomly oriented. The threshold energy for the double ionization of ClNO (30.1 ± 0.1 eV) and six dissociation channels producing NO+/Cl+, N+/Cl+, N+/O+, O+/Cl+, ClN+/O+, NO+/Cl2+ ion pairs, with their relative abundance and threshold energies, have been measured.
Keywords: Coulomb explosion; ab initio calculations; electron–ion–ion coincidence technique; molecular dications; potential energy surfaces; synchrotron radiation.