Stopping Power of Multiply Charged Ions

Fast ions, such as protons and alphas, interact with, and deposit energy in, target ions and molecules by converting kinetic energy of the projectile to target electronic energy. Such energy deposition occurs in situations as different as deep space and plasmas and can involve targets as different as atomic ions and rather complicated organic molecules [1]. In most cases, the deposition of electronic energy by a fast ion with velocity v in a target of scatterer particle density n is described by the equation: