A collisional approach for the study of electron solvation in water and ammonia clusters and autodetachment of solvated molecular anions

Electron attachment to water, deuterated water and ammonia clusters is studied with crossing beams techniques under single collision conditions. The use of laser‐excited Rydberg atoms as a source of electrons provides an excellent control of the energy distributions in the thermal domain (10–270 meV) which corresponds to the condensed phase conditions. The competition between two fast processes, nuclear reorganization and electron autodetachment, is studied as function of the cluster size as an attempt to link the behaviors of the solvent molecules in the gas phase and the liquid phase.