Photoinduced bond oscillations in ironpentacarbonyl give delayed synchronous bursts of carbonmonoxide release

Abstract

The photodissociation of transition metal carbonyls is involved in catalysis and synthetic processes. Here the authors, using semi-classical excited state molecular dynamics, observe details of the early stage dynamics in the photodissociation of Fe(CO)5, including synchronous bursts of CO at periodic intervals of 90 femtoseconds.