Gas-phase Ion Chemistry of Hydroxy and Amino-substituted Interstellar Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Protonated Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

Abstract

The gas-phase ion chemistry of hydroxyl- and amino-substituted polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and their protonated counterparts were studied using mass spectrometry. Ions were generated using an electron ionization (EI) source and the unimolecular chemistry of metastable ions was studied by performing mass-analysed ion kinetic energy spectrometry (MIKES) experiments with a magnetic sector tandem mass spectrometer. Collision-induced dissociation (CID) experiments were used in conjunction with MIKES experiments to determine ion structure. The ten molecules studied were: 1-naphthol, 2-naphthol, 1-naphthylamine, 2-naphthylamine, 1-aminoanthracene, 2-aminoanthracene, 1-phenanthrol, 9-phenanthrol, 1-hydroxypyrene and 1-aminopyrene. Since it is believed that larger PAHs, on the order of more than 50 carbon atoms, populate the interstellar medium, the goal of this study was to attempt to extrapolate the results from smaller systems to larger ones. The trends found include: hydroxy-substituted PAH radical cations lose carbon monoxide spontaneously and amino-substituted PAH radical cations lose HCN. Mechanisms for both processes are proposed, and it appears from the present results that this process should extrapolate to larger PAHs. Another trend found was that all the remaining fragment ions were always a closed ring. Protonated amino-substituted PAHs were generated by electrospray ionization using a quadruple time-of-flight mass spectrometer. By protonating 1-naphthol and 2-naphthol using methane in the high-pressure EI source, it was found that they lost exclusively H2O. As for 2-naphthylamine, 1-aminoanthracene and 2-aminoanthracene, it was found that 2-naphthylamine lost NH3 and a hydrogen atom, NH3being the dominant channel. However, as the ion size 3 increases, the hydrogen-loss channel became the dominant channel. This means that larger PAHs will likely lose exclusively a hydrogen atom to reform the parent radical cation.