Measurements of mobilities and longitudinal diffusion coefficients for Li+ ions in some molecular gases

Abstract

The transport coefficients for Li+ ions in some moleculars gases have been measured over a wide range of E/N with a conventional drift tube at temperatures close to 300 K. The zero-field reduced mobilities are found to be 3.91±0.11, 4.44±0.12, 3.64±0.10, 2.46±0.07, and 3.44±0.10 cm2/V s in N2, O2, CO, CO2, and CH4 gas, respectively, and these values except in O2 gas significantly deviate from the Langevin limit. In N2, CO, and CO2 gas, the resulting mobility curves show clear minima at intermediate E/N, but the depressions in O2 and CH4 gas are slight. The drop of the zero-field values in N2, CO, and CO2 gas is explained in terms of an effective ion–quadrupole interaction which provides the r−6 attractive behavior. From the mobility calculations with using n−4–6(γ) potential, it is suggested that the depression of the mobility curve is developed by the addition of a sufficient r−6 term and is partly attributed to inelastic collisions as expected even at intermediate E/N. The experimental diffusion data are compared with the values derived from the generalized Einstein relation. For all systems, the agreement is quite good at intermediate E/N, but there are large discrepancies at other E/N. The sources of the deviation are considered to be clustering reactions and inelastic collisions at low and high field, respectively.