Decay pathways for protonated and deprotonated adenine molecules

Abstract

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Journal of Chemical Physics 151.4 (2019): 044306 and may be found at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.5109963We have measured fragment mass spectra and total destruction cross sections for protonated and deprotonated adenine following collisions with He at center-of-mass energies in the 20-240 eV range. Classical and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations are used to provide detailed information on the fragmentation pathways and suggest a range of alternative routes compared to those reported in earlier studies. These new pathways involve, for instance, losses of HNC molecules from protonated adenine and losses of NH2 or C3H2N2 from deprotonated adenine. The present results may be important to advance the understanding of how biomolecules may be formed and processed in various astrophysical environmentsThis work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Constant Nos. 2017-00621, 2015-04990, 2016-04181, and 2018-04092). Furthermore, we acknowledge the European Joint on Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling (INT-EJD-TCCM). We acknowledge the generous allocation of computer time at the Centro de Computacion Cientifica at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (CCC-UAM). This work was partially supported by Project No. CTQ2016-76061-P of the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO