Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ashok Bhowmick
Technical Physics & Prototype Engineering Division, BARC, Trombay, Mumbai, India
Sunil K. Ghosh
ashokb@apsara.barc.ernet.in
Clusters of organics and metal-organic sandwiches have recently attracted the attention of
many researchers [1-2]. We have studied the formation of large free clusters of
cyclopentanone in gas phase through electrospray-TOF technique. As characteristic to the
ionization process, all the clusters are detected to be multiply charged. The single charge mass
spectrum is computed by deconvoluting the m/z spectrum using the standard routine [3]
normally applied to the analysis of peptide and protein electrospray spectra. Fig. 1 shows the
TOF spectra for both the m/z and mass domains together. The measurement has been carried
out using the high resolution TOF spectrometer reported earlier [4]. The mass of each cluster
essentially turns out to be the mass of an integral number of monomers with some hydrogen
losses which could be attributed to C-C formation between monomers. The clusters are
probably formed with highly symmetric arrangement of monomers coordinated through the
oxygen atoms and occasional C-C formation giving rise to a helical conformation. The base
structural repetition unit comprise of an association of six monomers. The calculated [5]
minimum energy configuration shows 3D non-planner cyclic arrangement forming a helical
ordering. Fig. 2 shows the probable structures of species H (lowest +1 mass) and C.
H C
Fig. 2