New insight into CO photodesorption from C60.

We report on new results concerning the interaction of CO with C(60) in the electronic ground state and an electronically excited state. We found that the energetically most favorable geometries are vertical or horizontal in the ground state but in the excited state the molecule is tilted by about 40°. The two-dimensional potential energy surfaces of these states were used to simulate the photodesorption process induced by a short laser-pulse. An interesting desorption mechanism was found, leading to a bimodal velocity distribution for each rotational quantum state if the molecule starts from the rovibronic ground state.