Hyperthermal chemical reactions

The development of hyperthermal neutral beam sources, some eight years ago, has disclosed a new field of beam research on charge transfer processes between neutral particles in their electronic ground state. In particular, charge transfer with low endoergicity of the order of 1 eV turned out to be very efficient and therefore has been studied extensively between its threshold and, say, 50 eV. The special interest of this field lies in its close relationship with chemical reaction kinetics and, from a theoretical point of view, its suitability to tell us more about diabatic behaviour at the crossing of potential energy surfaces. 

Single-collision beam experiments using state-selected reactants (the TESICO method and its variants, as mentioned above) provide detailed data mostly for hyperthermal collision energies. In reactions of hydrogen ions with rare gases, the chemical reactions... 

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