A model, recently developed for treating interactions between charged particles of dielectric materials (Bichoutskaia et al., J. Chem. Phys., 2010, 133, 024105), has been applied in an analysis of experimental data on the stability and fragmentation of highly charged carbon and fullerene clusters. Fragmentation data take the form of kinetic energy measurements that accompany the Coulomb fission of highly charged carbon clusters. For many of the examples chosen there is good agreement between

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... calculated and experimental results; however, the degree of uncertainty in some of the experimental data means that subtle features predicted by the model cannot be verified. When compared with an image charge model, treating carbon particles as a dielectric material reveals significant differences in the nature of the interaction potential.