With the wealth of instruments available here, we investigate the gas phase behavior of such species, especially phenomena such as coalescence and delayed ionization. The generation of fullerenes from this organometallic species was successful, although the low resulting yields meant that this would not be a viable tehcnique for the production of bulk quantities of fullerenes. This major discovery has strong implications for any developing applications of C60. Degradation must now become a serious consideration when utilizing C60. In follow up to the study of C60On oxides, the first successful fusion of C70 oxides was performed.
Delayed ionization is a known phenomenon exhibitied by fullerenes and metal clusters.
This discovery has implications for all instruments that rely on use of time-based ion gates as the basis for mass selection in a ToF instrument when investigating fullerenes. A study of fullerenes using ESI FT-ICR has shown that it is indeed possible to generate fullerene ions directly from the toluene solution using electrospray, without the need for any other reagents. The literature to date has only included investigations that involved the modification of the solution to assist ionization, except for only one group that has previously managed to record an ESI spectrum from a pure toluene solution. Unimolecular fragmentation, low energy CID, and high energy CID were studied. Cage rupture via CmHn loss was observed, rather than the loss of C2 units.