Xe + -ion capture by neutral Ar and Ne clusters

A supersonic jet of cold neutral van der Waals clusters consisting of Ar and Ne atoms was sent through a Nier-type ion source and allowed to interact with thermal Xe ions produced therein via dissociative ion capture (DIC). A comparison of the resulting ions of the type Ar n Xe+ and Ne n Xe+ with pure Ar and Ne cluster ion distributions produced by electron impact (EI) of the same neutral vdW cluster precursor distribution shows characteristic differences in the overall shape of the distribution and in the ion stabilities (i.e. in the occurence of magic numbers in the mass spectra). To shed more light onto these differences we performed classical molecular dynamic calculations (MD) on the dynamics and Kinetics of these two ionization processes (DIC and EI) and found good agreement between the experimental results and the results deduced from these simulations.