As these processes are known to be relevant to biophysics and radiation therapy, a question arises whether a massive ion could be transferred in biochemical processes and lead to fragmentation. Specifically, in a complex bio-environment, does heavy ion transfer play a role?

The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, and Centre de recherche sur les Ions, les MAtériaux et la Photonique (CIMAP) in France.

Interatomic Coulombic decay is a typical process that demonstrates the energy and charge transfer over a large distance between atomic components in a cluster and results in fragmentation, proving that forbidden channels for isolated atoms/molecules may be opened due to the presence of neighboring atoms. Here, the energy and charge transfers are mediated by virtual photon or Coulomb interaction.

<p font-size:14px;white-space:normal;background-color:#ffffff;"="" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 15px; text-align: justify; letter-spacing: 0.7px; text-wrap: wrap; outline: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Microsoft yahei", Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In hydrogen-bond clusters, the proton transfer process plays an important role as well. It involves mass and charge migration over large distances within the cluster and results in fragmentation of the latter. Nevertheless, in previous research, this kind of transfer process was limited to hydrogen-bond clusters.