Bound electron stopping power model of partially stripped ions in partially ionized plasmas

Abstract

In this work, an expression for the bound electron stopping power of partially ionized highly energetic ions for partially ionized plasmas in the context of the Bethe approximation, in both local thermodynamic equilibrium and nonequilibrium, is presented and studied. The mean excitation energy of the stopping power incorporates a detailed description of the bound electron states of both the ion beam and plasma under different thermodynamic regimes. In the analysis carried out, we focus our attention on fully stripped ion beams in partially ionized aluminum plasmas. The temperature and electron density ranges considered were 4–100 eV and 1016–1022 cm−3, respectively.