Eur. Phys. J. D 63, 441-448 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2011-20221-2

Regular Article

Electron impact dissociation of ND⁺: formation of D⁺

¹ Université catholique de Louvain, Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanosciences, Chemin du Cyclotron 2, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
² Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade, P.O. Box 386, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia
³ Université Cadi Ayyad, Faculté Polydisciplinaire de Safi, Département des Sciences de la Matière, P.O. Box 4162, 46000 Safi, Morocco

^a e-mail: julien.lecointre@uclouvain.be

Received: 15 April 2011
Published online: 17 June 2011

Abstract

Absolute cross sections for electron impact dissociation of ND⁺ leading to the formation of D⁺ have been measured by applying the animated electron-ion beam method in the energy range from the reaction threshold up to 2.5 keV. The maximum inclusive cross section is observed to be (16.8 ± 0.8) × 10^-17 cm² at the electron energy of 65.1 eV. The appearance energy for the D⁺ production is measured to be (4.0 ± 0.5) eV. Collected data are analyzed in details by means of an original procedure in order to determine separately the contributions of dissociative channels. A specific Monte Carlo modeling has been developed, which is proven to reconstruct adequately the dissociative ionization cross section. The present energy thresholds provide information about the ground and excited states of the molecular ion, as well as about the possible population of the vibrational levels. The reaction D₂(v) + N ⁺  (or H₂(v) + N ⁺ ) is a probable source for that population and it constitutes the first step of the molecular activated processes, so the corresponding chain of reactions has to be considered to study the chemistry of plasma sources.