| Abstract: | A simple, accurate and reproducible method is described for measuring the appearance energy of a metastable peak. The method involves the comparison of the metastable peak intensity with that of a ‘standard’ metastable peak, over a small range of ionizing electron energies above their onsets. Six fragmentation processes whose reaction energetics are well established were selected to provide suitable calibrant metastable peaks. Results are also presented for fragmentations having large kinetic shifts and for some primary and secondary ion decomposition of current interest. |
