Reactivity in ion-neutral high density media

Abstract

The recent development of hybrid traps technology has revolutionized the field of cold chemistry. Recently, new trap configurations have been built in order to explore more involve chemical processes, among them is the three-body recombination involving ions and neutrals. Different ion-neutral-neutral reactions at low collision energies: 0.1 mK - 10 mK, are studied by means of a very recent method for classical trajectory calculations in hyperspherical coordinates for treating three-body collisions [J. Pérez-Ríos, S. Ragole, J. Wang and C. H. Greene, J. Chem. Phys. 140, 044307 (2014)]. On the other hand a classically derived threshold law is obtained and numerically confirmed. The derived threshold law predicts molecular ions should dominate over molecular neutrals as the most products formed.