On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
My current line of thinking for the ion beam stuff -- there is something in > the electronic structure of the substrate that is at work here, be it > plasmons, or shielding, or cracks, my favorite, sufficient deceleration in > the fields of heavy lattice atoms to keep the interacting nuclei close to > one another for a prolonged period of time sufficient to > achieve tunneling and sharing of momentum with the spectator lattice atom. > That was a little word-salady. The "electronic structure" mentioned above is perhaps two things -- apart from its relevance in other contexts such as plasmons and so on, it is in this context, first, the Coulomb field of the heavy lattice atoms, which is used to beneficial effect through the deceleration it provides to oncoming light nuclei. It can be expected to cause them to linger around for a little while before they bounce back out; longer, at any rate, than they might have stuck around in free space or in simple elastic collisions with ligher nuclei. It's sort of like the longish bounce you get on a large trampoline versus the very quick bounce you get on a small, exercise trampoline. Second, "electronic structure" here is intended to refer to the Auger-like effect that has been proposed elsewhere where a light atom is accelerated in place of an Auger electron that would be ejected upon the receipt of an incoming photon in the normal course of events. Eric
