Cooling of PAH cations studied with an electrostatic storage ring

In this paper we discuss the production of molecular PAH cations using an ECR ion source and their subsequent cooling studied with an electrostatic storage ring, the Mini-Ring on a time range up to 10 ms. We show that the ECR ion source can produce high currents of small PAH cation, here naphthalene and anthracene cations. Then, we report experimental result for the cooling of three PAH cations (anthracene, naphthalene and pyrene) stored in our compact electrostatic storage ring (the Mini-Ring). We show that the Poincaré recurrent fluorescence plays a major role in the cooling process of those PAH cations. We show that for a given internal energy, the cooling rate is much smaller for pyrene than for anthracene and naphthalene. We conclude that the Poincaré recurrent fluorescence is less efficient due to smaller oscillator strength of the D2-D0 electronic transition for pyrene.