Laser induced fission of C60 with kinetic energy release

A neutral C₆₀ fullerene beam is ionised by 308 nm laser pulses. For each cluster sizeC _n ⁺ , 0n60 of the typical bimodal mass distributions known from the literature 1] velocity distributions have been determined by a time of flight method. A consistent interpretation of the measured mean velocities is obtained when binary fission of the parent molecule is assumed to be responsible for the fragmentation patterns, the total kinetic energy release being 0.45±0.1 eV independent of fragment mass and of laser fluence.