Strong impact of protonation and deprotonation on intermolecular Coulombic decay

Abstract

Intermolecular Coulombic decay (ICD) is an ultrafast relaxation mechanism of a highly excited system embedded in a chemical environment. Our theoretical investigation of ammonia clusters shows that the ICD efficiency can be regulated by protonation or deprotonation. It is suggested that by varying ICD rate through changing the environmental pH value a control over the relaxation dynamics can be achieved. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.