Relative stability of naphthalene, quinoline and isoquinoline under high energy electron impact

Abstract Stability of naphthalene and two of its nitrogen containing derivatives namely, quinoline and isoquinoline are investigated under high energy electron impact. Astro-biologically important statistical dissociation channels are probed using the delayed extraction time-of-flight mass spectrometry technique. The experimental configuration was designed to avoid yield variation due to the thermal velocities for 5 μs or more after the collision. The statistical decay channels show an increase in the yield of daughter ions as a function of extraction delay in the range of 10 6  s −1 . On the other hand, the yields due to fast dissociation channels were observed to decrease as a function of extraction delay. On the basis of projectile beam energy dependence of the yields, the effect of plasmon excitation in quinoline and isoquinoline is shown for the first time. A strong dependence of the statistical dissociation yield on the location of the nitrogen atom in the two molecules is observed. An attempt is made to correlate these observations with the various structure parameters obtained using structure calculations.