A new intermolecular mechanism to selectively drive photoinduced damages

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel intermolecular cascade mechanism initiated by core excitation and ending with ICD, allowing controlled delivery of damaging electrons for potential applications in targeted radiation therapy.

Contribution

It proposes and demonstrates a new cascade process involving core excitation and ICD, with controllable electron energies for selective radiation damage.

Findings

ICD electron energies can be controlled by initial atomic excitation.

The cascade mechanism can be initiated by resonant X-ray absorption in high-Z elements.

Potential applications in targeted cancer radiotherapy.

Abstract

Low-energy electrons (LEEs) are known to be effective in causing strand breaks in DNA. Recent experiments show that an important direct source of LEEs is the intermolecular Coulombic decay (ICD) process. Here we propose a new cascade mechanism initiated by core excitation and terminated by ICD and demonstrate its properties. Explicit calculations show that the energies of the emitted ICD-electrons can be controlled by selecting the initial atomic excitation. The properties of the cascade may have interesting applications in the fields of electron spectroscopy and radiation damage. Initiating such a cascade by resonant X-ray absorption from a high-Z element embedded in a cancerous cell nucleus, ICD will deliver genotoxic particles \textit{locally} at the absorption site, increasing in that way the controllability of the induced damage.