Investigating resonant low-energy electron attachment to formamide: dynamics of model peptide bond dissociation and other fragmentation channels

Author(s): Panelli, Guglielmo; Moradmand, Ali; Griffin, Brandon; Swanson, Kyle; Weber, Thorsten; Rescigno, Thomas N; McCurdy, C William; Slaughter, Daniel S; Williams, Joshua B | Abstract: We report experimental results on three-dimensional momentum imaging measurements of anions generated via dissociative electron attachment to gaseous formamide. From the momentum images, we analyze the angular and kinetic energy distributions for NH$_2^{-}$, O$^{-}$, and H$^{-}$ fragments and discuss the possible electron attachment and dissociation mechanisms for multiple resonances for two ranges of incident electron energies, from 5.3~eV to 6.8~eV, and from 10.0~eV to 11.5~eV. {\it Ab initio} theoretical results for the angular distributions of the NH$_2^{-}$ anion for $\sim$6~eV incident electrons, when compared with the experimental results, strongly suggest that one of the two resonances producing this fragment is a $^2$A$''$ Feshbach resonance.