Ion-solid interaction

Abstract

This chapter gives an introduction into the theoretical description of the physical processes which take place during the ion motion through a solid target. The interaction of the ion with the whole solid is treated as a sequence of binary collisions with free target atoms at rest. Furthermore, the elastic and inelastic contributions to the binary collisions are considered to be statistically independent and therefore they are treated separately. The elastic interaction provides changes of the energy and the direction of the ion. It is described by classical mechanics and determined by the ion-atom interaction potential. The inelastic interaction provides mainly a change of the energy of the ion which has to be described by quantum mechanics, however, also some classical approaches are presented. For amorphous solids, mainly considered here, the binary collisions can be assumed to be statistically independent and the physical quantities (e.g. energy and angular distributions) are obtained by statistics. In the case of crystalline solids, only some special effects are described.