Photodissociation of Manganese Oxide Cluster Cations.

Manganese oxide cluster cations are produced by laser vaporization in a pulsed nozzle source, and detected with time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The mass spectrum contains intense peaks for stoichiometries corresponding to (MnO)n+. Multiphoton photodissociation of these clusters yields smaller ions with the same stoichiometric ratio, either by sequential elimination of MnO units or by various fission processes with roughly equal efficiencies. Fragmentation of clusters containing excess oxygen also yields (MnO)n+ fragments. These apparently stable fragments are investigated further using density functional theory to determine their likely structures. The lowest energy structure for Mn2O2+ is found to be a planar ring, and those for Mn4O4+ and Mn6O6+ are cuboids. Mn3O3+ is predicted to have a six-membered ring structure and Mn5O5+ has a fused cube/ring configuration similar to the structure of the oxygen evolving center of Photosystem II. Open-shell, high spin configurations on individual manganese atoms couple anti-ferromagnetically and ferromagnetically to produce low-spin and high spin configurations on different sized clusters.