Charge Exchange between Hydrogen Atoms and Fully Stripped Heavy Ions

Charge exchange between multicharged ions and background atomic and molecular gases represents one of the limitations to the attainment of high charge states in heavy ion sources, particularly containment sources. This work is an attempt to study systematically a particularly simple but in many respects representative class of such reactions, namely, charge transfer between atomic hydrogen and fully stripped heavy ions. Approximate cross sections for these processes in the low keV range of collision energies were obtained using a multistate Landau-Zener method. The energy and Z dependences of the cross sections are discussed.