Nat Commun 15, 8442 (2024)
The Stabilization of Cyanonaphthalene by Fast Radiative Cooling
Hansen K.1
1 Center for Joint Quantum Studies and Department of Physics, School of Science, Tianjin University, 92 Weijin Road, Tianjin 300072, China
* KlavsHansen@tju.edu.cn
Abstract
The description of unimolecular decays is essential for our understanding of the cosmic molecular inventory. In ref. 1 Stockett et al. report measurements of kinetic energy release distributions of the unimolecular decay and the radiative cooling of cyanonaphthalene, from which the authors reconstruct the ions’ decay rate coefficient. The measured kinetic energy distributions is converted to an excitation energy without regard to the significant difference between the measured product temperature and the temperature needed to represent the decay constant with the chosen Arrhenius-like representation. The procedure used by the authors leads to a significant error in the estimate of the activation energy, and thereby an exponentially amplified error in the rate constant.
