Extracting Residence Times of Nitric Oxide on Graphene through Combination of Time-of-Flight and Velocity Map Imaging

In this work, energy transfer between nitric oxide radicals and graphene was measured as a function of incidence energy, and residence times of the trapped NO molecules were extracted. This was done by combining time-of-flight methods with surface-velocity map imaging and by the forward simulation of the expected arrival profiles. Combining these two techniques allows us to derive those residence times even though the employed molecular beams have opening times that would otherwise prevent such measurements if only one of these experimental techniques was used in isolation. We find that significant energy transfer to the graphene occurs, increasing with increasing incidence energy, and that trapped NO may reside on the graphene for tens of microseconds at room temperature.