Pyrolysis of mass-selected (V2O5)(N)O- (N=1-6) clusters in a high-temperature linear ion trap reactor

A high-temperature linear ion trap that can stably run up to 873 K was newly designed and installed into a homemade reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometer coupled with a laser ablation cluster source and a quadrupole mass filter. The instrument was used to study the pyrolysis behavior of mass-selected (V2O5)(N)O- (N = 1-6) cluster anions and the dissociation channels were clarified with atomistic precision. Similar to the dissociation behavior of the heated metal oxide cluster cations reported in literature, the desorption of either atomic oxygen atom or molecular O-2 prevailed for the (V2O5)(N)O- clusters with N = 2-5 at 873 K. However, novel dissociation channels involving fragmentation of (V2O5)(N)O- to small-sized VxOy- anions concurrent with the release of neutral vanadium oxide species were identified for the clusters with N = 3-6. Significant variations in branching ratios for different dissociation channels were observed as a function of cluster size. Kinetic studies indicated that the dissociation rates of (V2O5)(N)O- monotonically increased with the increase in cluster size. The internal energies carried by the (V2O5)(N)O- clusters at 873 K as well as the energetics data for dissociation channels have been theoretically calculated to rationalize the experimental observations. The decomposition behavior of vanadium oxide clusters from this study can provide new insights into the pyrolysis mechanism of metal oxide nanoparticles that are widely used in high temperature catalysis.