Dissociation energies of protonated water clusters

Relative abundances of positively ionized water clusters formed in a low-pressure electrical discharge as function of reduced electric field were obtained by using drift cell and quadrupole mass spectrometer. It was noticed that some clusters say with n=4 were more abundant than others, at comparable drift conditions. Dissociation energies have been derived from equilibrium conditions for relative clusters abundances. The Hartree-Fock method in 6-311G** molecular-basis set has been applied to calculations of binding energies for different structural 'families' of clusters