Erlangen 2022 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 22: Charged ions and their applications

A 22.6: Talk

Thursday, March 17, 2022, 12:00–12:15, A-H1

Water-assisted electron capture exceeds photorecombination in biological conditions — •Axel Molle^1,2, Oleg Zatsarinny³, Thomas Jagau², Alain Dubois¹, and Nicolas Sisourat¹ — ¹Laboratoire de Chimie Physique - Matière et Rayonnement, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France — ²Quantum Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, KU Leuven, Belgium — ³Department of Physics and Astronomy, Drake University, Des Moines, USA

A decade ago, an electron-attachment process called interatomic coulombic electron capture has been predicted to be possible through energy transfer to a nearby neighbour. It has been estimated to be competitive with environment-independent photorecombination for selected examples of reaction partners. Its impact on biological systems, however, has yet to be investigated.

Here, we evaluate therefore the capability of alkali and alkaline earth metal cations to capture a free electron by assistance from a nearby water molecule. We introduce a characteristic distance r_IC for this energy transfer mechanism in equivalence to the Förster radius for energy transfer between chromophores which allows to estimate the quantum efficiency. We find r_IC bound from above. This water-assisted electron capture dominates over photorecombination beyond the second hydration shell of each alkali and alkaline earth cation for electron energies above a threshold. It will be measurable against photorecombination in an experiment around that threshold energy.