Interactions of energetic ions with fullerenes, PAHs, and their weakly bound clusters

This brief review highlights recent advances in our understanding on how fullerenes, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), and their clusters respond to singly and multiply charged keV-ion impact. These studies reveal how the projectile charge, mass, and velocity may be tuned to investigate, e.g., the stabilities of multiply charged monomers and clusters, different monomer and cluster cooling processes, molecular heating by Coulomb explosions of highly charged clusters, and impulse driven molecular growth processes.