Eur. Phys. J. D 38, 489-493 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2006-00055-9

Newly calculated absolute cross-section for the electron-impact ionization of C₂H₂⁺

¹ Institut für Physik, Ernst Moritz Arndt Universität Greifswald, Domstr. 10a, 17487 Greifswald, Germany
² Department of Physics and Center for Environmental Systems, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, USA
³ Université Catholique de Louvain, Département de Physique (PAMO), Chemin du Cyclotron 2, 1348 Louvain-la Neuve, Belgium
⁴ Institut für Ionenphysik, Leopold Franzens Universität Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 25, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
⁵ Department of Chemistry, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, 10900, Thailand

Corresponding author: ^a kbecker@stevens.edu

Received: 9 December 2005
Revised: 7 January 2006
Published online: 14 March 2006

Abstract

New measurements of the cross-section for electron impact ionization of the molecular ion C₂H₂⁺ have been carried out recently. These data differ significantly from earlier data, because cross-sections corresponding to all the possible dissociative ionization processes were determined. The new data in conjunction with the significant discrepancies between the earlier data and the results of various calculations, which disagreed among themselves by a factor of 3, motivated a renewed attempt to apply the semi-classical Deutsch-Märk (DM) formalism to the calculation of the absolute electron-impact ionization cross-section of this molecular ion. A quantum chemical molecular orbital population analysis for both the neutral molecule and the ion revealed that in the case of C₂H₂⁺ the singly occupied molecular orbital (i.e. the “missing” electron) is highly localized near the site of a C atom in the molecule. This information is explicitly incorporated in our formalism. The results obtained by taking the ionic character directly into account are in excellent agreement with the recent experimental data.