Isotope effects in the electron impact break-up of water

Abstract

Total fragmentation of and has been studied as a function of incident energy over the range from threshold to 325 eV. A small subset of possible dissociation channels has been selected by making use of a novel solid xenon matrix detector which is selectively sensitive to metastable atoms. O-fragment kinetic energies and appearance potentials have been measured and significant isotopic effects are observed. Within the errors of the measurements the cross section for production from is the same as that from . The cross sections reach a maximum value of at 100 eV incident electron energy.