Dynamics of resonant low energy electron attachment to dimethyl formamide

The investigation of resonant low-energy electron capture and the associated fragmentation pathways have been a topic of interest for the past few decades. However, those studies were constrained in their ability to pinpoint resonant states and their corresponding decay channels. The development of the velocity map imaging (VMI) technique has significantly enhanced these studies, offering the efficient inspection of the underlying dynamics of the dissociation process. Over the last decade, VMI studies have been extended from simple diatomic [1] to complex molecules, including alcohols [2] and acids [3], as well as molecules with specific chemical bonds like peptides [4]. Recently, we also employed the VMI technique to investigate the dissociative electron attachment (DEA) to the dimethyl formamide (DMF) molecule. We measured highly differential laboratory-frame momentum distributions of O^- fragments across a series of energies spanning the 6 eV resonance. The kinetic energy distribution of the O^- fragments reveals the chemistry of the dissociation process, while the angular distribution of the O^- ions relative to the incident electron energy unveils the symmetry of the resonant anion states. These findings will be discussed in detail during the conference. [1] E. Krishnakumar, V. S. Prabhudesai, and N. J. Mason, Nat. Phys. 14(2), 149, (2018). [2] D. Chakraborty, D. S. Slaughter, and S. Ptasinska, Phys. Rev. A 108, 052806, (2023), [3] D. S. Slaughter et al. Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 22, 13893 (2020) [4] G. Panneli, et al. Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 013082, (2021).