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Updated: Jun 5, 2026

Isolating Free Carbenes, their Mixed Dimers and Organic Radicals
Published on: April 19, 2019
Metastable anions of dinitrobenzene: resonances for electron attachment and kinetic energy release
A Mauracher1, S Denifl, A Edtbauer
1Institut für Ionenphysik und Angewandte Physik and Center for Molecular Biosciences Innsbruck, Leopold Franzens Universität, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
Abstract:
Attachment of free, low-energy electrons to dinitrobenzene (DNB) in the gas phase leads to DNB(-) as well as several fragment anions. DNB(-), (DNB-H)(-), (DNB-NO)(-), (DNB-2NO)(-), and (DNB-NO(2))(-) are found to undergo metastable (unimolecular) dissociation. A rich pattern of resonances in the yield of these metastable reactions versus electron energy is observed; some resonances are highly isomer-specific. Most metastable reactions are accompanied by large average kinetic energy releases (KER) that range from 0.5 to 1.32 eV, typical of complex rearrangement reactions, but (1,3-DNB-H)(-) features a resonance with a KER of only 0.06 eV for loss of NO. (1,3-DNB-NO)(-) offers a rare example of a sequential metastable reaction, namely, loss of NO followed by loss of CO to yield C(5)H(4)O(-) with a large KER of 1.32 eV. The G4(MP2) method is applied to compute adiabatic electron affinities and reaction energies for several of the observed metastable channels.
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