Lifetimes of C60 2- and C70 2- dianions in a storage ring

C60 2- and C70 2- dianions have been produced by electrospray of the monoanions and subsequent electron pickup in a Na vapor cell. The dianions were stored in an electrostatic ring and their decay by electron emission was measured up to 1 s after injection. While C70 2- ions are stable on this time scale, except for a small fraction of the ions which have been excited by gas collisions, most of the C60 2- ions decay on a millisecond time scale, with a lifetime depending strongly on their internal temperature. The results can be modeled as decay by electron tunneling through a Coulomb barrier, mainly from thermally populated triplet states about 120 meV above a singlet ground state. At times longer than about 100 ms, the absorption of blackbody radiation plays an important role for the decay of initially cold ions. The tunneling rates obtained from the modeling, combined with WKB estimates of the barrier penetration, give a ground-state energy 200±30 meV above the energy of the monoanion plus a free electron and a ground-state lifetime of the order of 20 s.