Correlated ion and neutral time of flight technique combined with velocity map imaging: Quantitative measurements for dissociation processes in excited molecular nano-systems

The combination of the Dispositif d’Irradiation d’Agregats Moleculaire with the correlated ion and neutral time of flight–velocity map imaging technique provides a new way to explore processes occurring subsequent to the excitation of charged nano-systems. The present contribution describes in detail the methods developed for the quantitative measurement of branching ratios and cross sections for collision-induced dissociation processes of water cluster nano-systems. These methods are based on measurements of the detection efficiency of neutral fragments produced in these dissociation reactions. Moreover, measured detection efficiencies are used here to extract the number of neutral fragments produced for a given charged fragment.