Adiabatic decomposition of mass-selected alkali clusters

The decomposition of metastable photoionized mass-selected alkali clusters is investigated using a tandem time-of-flight spectrometer. Na+n and K+n are found to decompose mainly by the evaporation of either a single neutral atom or a neutral dimer in a time scale of about 10 μs. The predominant fragmentation channels are found to follow the adiabatic dissociation channels associated with the lowest energies accordingly to our CI calculations. In the light of our experimental and theoretical results a comparison between the different calculations of the absolute atomization energies available in the literature is presented.